Greg Bulmash wrote:
Open Office and I were getting along swimmingly, then two things
happened that made me dump it.
Search and Replace: Word has support for "special characters" (i.e.
line breaks, paragraph breaks, page breaks, etc.) When you're trying
to convert an e-mail full of broekn lines back into paragraphs, via a
search and replace, it's simple with Word, impossible with Open
Office. Wasn't enough to make me dump OO.o (as I could do it in an
external text editor).
I set up a test file with random line breaks and found I can search for
ends of lines and replace them with nothing via find "$" and replace
with "". That gets rid of line breaks. I know that's over simplified,
but read about "regular expressions" in the help file. ;-)
Mail Merge: With Microsoft it's simple. Create a table or
spreadsheet, use the first row as headers, and then just punch in the
data in the following rows. The headers are taken as field names when
you do a mail merge. If they don't match a predefined set, no
problem. It's easy to plug in your custom fields.
Open Office kept trying to force me to use its built-in database
component or address book component, neither of which could be made
suitable to my desired workflow methods. I couldn't use an .odt doc
with a table, nor could I use a spreadsheet. Perhaps I'm missing some
special thing I need to do to use one of them, but in Word, I don't
have to do it.
I've got some large mailings coming up. I'd have to spend many extra
hours stumbling through OO.o's preferred way of doing things instead
of doing things my preferred way.
I've only done mail merge in MS Word 97 before now. Never tried it in
OOo before. I read your message and thought I'd give it a try. I
started the mail merge wizard, followed the prompts and tried to load an
old dbf file directly in the wizard and it wouldn't continue to the next
dialog for some reason. So, I decided to load the dbf into calc. I had
a feeling all would be Ok with a calc file for the database. That took
a minute to save the file as type .ods. Then I re-started the mail
merge wizard and followed the prompts. This time I got past database
selection and went on to matching up data fields and creating the merge
document. I had a mail merge file in about 10 minutes. All I had left
to do from here was print it. It seemed as intuitive as MS mail merge
to me.
I had to give OOo an appropriate amount of time and look up a couple of
things in the help, but I think I had to do that with MS word. I had to
learn their way of doing it and had some initial problems, but I was
persistent. I think this approach might apply to OOo.
:-)
Best,
Alex
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