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------- Additional comments from [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thu Nov 3 00:59:08 -0800 2005 ------- Hey'All - Just want to say that the mail merge in the new OOo 2.0 IS better than the 1.x series - however, I still had a hard time figuring it out. I do layout, as well as web programming, and often do mail merges with Adobe Pagemaker, Avery Designer, and MS Word. Here's what I offer for suggestions: 1. Allow "labels", etc, as options in the mail merge wizard - it's really confusing to go to one place for letters, and another for labels. It took me forever to figure out that for labels, i had to start out by going to "File - New - Labels", and then remember to check the "synchronize records" thing in the "options" tab - good thing it was in the help file - but normally I don't have to read the help file to figure out mail merge!! 2. Put some step in the wizard to allow inserting of other fields besides the salutation and address block. Personally, I always skip this anyway so I don't have to bother with matching my field names up to do the address block. But it's not obvious because the option is not given. And the salutation thing, while nice, is kind of confusing. It should be offered on a push-button to another pop-up window or something, instead of being its own step. Why not have an "insert fields" step - with one button to go to the "salutation" dialog, one to the "address" dialog, and then just a list of the fields in the data source to drag and drop over displayed by default? Right now, you have to either hit F4 to bring up data sources, or Ctrl-F2 for "insert fields". neither of these is obvious, though they do have nice featuresets. 3. Don't actually do the merge until the last step - right now it does sort of a "preview" merge of all the records before you even get to the last step, where it asks you "print" or "merge to file", etc. for large files with graphics, this could cause a huge performance hit. sometimes it would be good to merge straight to printer without doing the whole merge ahead of time to a temporary file - for performance reasons. MS word does this - it asks you at the last step, whether to merge straight to printer, or merge to a new word doc to do editing or saving before print. Don't actually do the whole merge before the user asks you to. 4. fix the merge to email, finally. For anyone else reading this, I finally found the hack to fix this - it's not that hard - read http://internet.cybermesa.com/~aaron_w/OOo_email_merge/OOo_email_merge.html hopefully this gets merged into a release soon, then we won't have to do the hack to make it work, but i'm still happy to get it to work anyway - the hack wasn't that bad - copy a file, run one command-line command, and change one value in a text file in an obscure folder. not too bad. thanks everyone for all their work on this project, i'm still quite grateful. peace aaron --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please do not reply to this automatically generated notification from Issue Tracker. Please log onto the website and enter your comments. http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/project_issues.html#notification --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
