Harold Fuchs wrote:
On 09/10/2008 07:16, Brian Barker wrote:
At 12:46 09/10/2008 +1100, Keith Bates wrote:
When I perform marriages I need to fill in about three or four
forms [...] At the moment, most of them are filled in by hand
because it's easier than making the effort to organise templates
etc. to print the information into the right spot on the form. What
I'm thinking is make a document (spreadsheet?) to enter the
information then have OO put that into the right places so I can
print onto the forms.
Either you or I may be slightly confused here! Entering the
information into a separate document is one way to go, but it
wouldn't avoid the work you seem to be fighting shy of. There is no
magical way that the information would know where to appear, so you
would need to have "made the effort", as you put it, to create that
template first. And once you have created that template, there is no
obvious reason - at least using the technique I'm going to suggest -
why having a separate document for input would be any easier.
Here's an idea:
o Scan the form.
o Create a new text (Writer) document the same size as your form.
o Go to Insert | Picture > | From File... and browse to your scanned
form.
o Go to Format | Picture... (or right-click | Picture...) and change
some settings. On the Type tab, under Anchor, select "To page"; and
under Position, select Left for Horizontal and Top for Vertical. On
the Options tab, under Properties, remove the tick from Print.
(That's the clever bit.)
o Select the picture and drag its bottom right corner to the
corresponding corner of the page (that's the entire page, of course -
beyond any margins). Now that you have the picture filling the page,
it may be difficult to see how to deselect the picture: I find that
pressing the Esc key accomplishes this.
o With the picture deselected, go to Insert | Frame... . You will
probably need to change some settings here, too. On the Type tab,
remove the tick from AutoSize. On the Borders tab, select "- None -".
o Drag and resize the frame to coincide with the area on the form
where the text needs to be inserted.
o Repeat the last two steps, creating a separate frame for each
required entry.
o Go to File | Templates > | Save... and save the document as a
template.
o (Close the document, discarding changes.)
Each time you need to use the template, fill in the frames and print
on the blank form. Note that the background image of the form will
not print. Save as a document file for reference if desired.
If you want to be able to enter text separately or to retrieve it
from another document, one way is to use linked sections. Create
suitably named sections to contain the relevant text in the source
text document. In your template, put the cursor into each frame in
turn and insert a section into the frame. On the Section tab of the
Insert Section dialogue, tick Link, use the "..." button to browse to
the source file, and select the relevant named section from the
drop-down menu at Section. Remember to use Tools | Update > | Links
when necessary in using the template. But I fancy that it will be
difficult to format the sections in such a way as to be absolutely
sure that the text will be neatly formatted without checking it over
in the document itself - which may render the indirect technique of
no particular benefit.
I trust this helps.
Brian Barker
I get the impression that Mr. Bates wants to have the same data
inserted at different places within the same form and/or in different
forms. Inserting the same value in different places in a document can
be achieved with fields and variables. I don't think you can have a
field whose value is defined and which then becomes available in
different documents. So it may be necessary to have all the forms in a
single document. There's a guide to using fields in Chapter 14 of the
Writer's Guide at
<http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/OOoAuthors_User_Manual/Writer_Guide/Working_with_Fields>.
In particular see the subsection entitled "Using other fields to hold
information that changes"
IF it's desirable to have the forms in different documents, the
mail-merge capability could be used for all of them to get the
information from a common source (a database, for example).
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