I am using OpenOffice 2.4. I have been trying to set up an ad hoc
mailing list to merge with a letter in Writer. The only way I have been
able to hook up with a database or list of names is to register the
whole Office Suite to use the same database. I have a list of names for
a particular project that I would like to merge on the fly, so to speak,
rather than making an official registration of a particular address list
that gets used by every mergeable application in the suite.
Secondly, when I did get it to create a database and I entered one
record to experiment, I had to create the database table myself, and
there were a lot of fields that the merge wizard asked for that were not
in the database. Why doesn't the application just create an address list
with all the default fields already there, with the flexibility still to
add whatever else may be needed?
Thirdly, when I did get the application to enter an address into the
letter, the formatting (font face, size, etc.) did not match the rest of
the letter. I have been working with MS Office 97 for years, and it
wasn't nearly this difficult to get a mail merge to come out right.
I finally gave up and did a manual merge.
I still need to figure this out for future applications.
Suggestions for the developers:
1. make it easier to attach any address list, rather than register a
system address book.
2. Offer a default list of fields when creating a list of addresses that
includes all the options available in the mailmerge wizard.
3. allow formatting of the fields used in the main document the way you
can in MS Word. The way it is now, you can't even see the fields in the
base document. The address block of fields exists only in the wizard,
and the wizard doesn't know how I want the text to look when I'm done. I
couldn't even tell it where to insert spaces and commas.
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