The issue of blank fields in mail merges has been raised several times
in issuezilla since version 1.0.3, but it keeps getting reclassified as
an enhancement. I have to disagree that this is an enhancement. The
functionality of a properly working and usable mail merge is an
essential component of an office suite. I know that funds are tight
and developers are overworked, but this has got to be seen to.
Luckily for you Mike, you can program in perl and get a properly
formatted address list that way. Your example does show, however, some
of the extraordinary steps that someone sometimes has to take to get a
working mail merge with OpenOffice.
At the very least, the help screens should describe in detail how to set
up the suppression of blank fields. Back when I was first learning to
suppress blank fields in OpenOffice mail merges, I found that the help
left out a whole lot of the steps and layers of nuance necessary to get
the mail merge to work properly.
mike scott wrote:
On 7 Aug 2005 at 6:32, Vaughn L. Reid III wrote:
One of the crucial usability features that OpenOffice lacks is the
ability to automatically suppress blank lines caused by empty fields in
a mail merge.
While that would be useful, it would seem better to fix a more general
problem if it's going to be tackled at all; namely, along the lines of
"if field X is(is not) blank, insert string Y" (blank-line-suppression
is clearly a special case). This would mean that, for example, commas
could be inserted between fields in a list if necessary and not appear
if they weren't needed. OTOH this could easily turn into a full-blown
macro processor.
I'm almost sure I raised this with the list a year or so back, without
much interest. I still resort to exporting my family's address book as
a csv file and processing with a perl script to make a readable
physical address book that has the fields I want, and is reasonably
laid out (via rtf and then re-import into OOo - !!!): fortunately I'm
not usually in the mail merge business (except maybe at Christmas!)
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