Arghhhh - Labels and Mail Merge
OK, so today I got my first issue with Open Office and Thunderbird...
In previous years, we have used our Outlook Contacts as source data for creating Envelope Labels, we have a category defined "Christmas Cards" which means we can simply merge our e-mail contact postal addresses out to a label format in word, print them and slap them on the envelopes.
Issue 1: Thunderbird doesn't support Categories - Arghhhh
Work Around 1: Export everything to a calc source sheet, edit out the unwanted addressess and then merge them into writer
Issue 2: Did they forget some functionality in the Open Office Mail Merge wizard? It only seems possible to use the wizard to merge to a letter format - Arghhh
Work Around 2: Discovered that you can add data fields inside the label dialog (you can also use Thunderbird Address Book directly as a data source). Managed to create the necessary labels for printing, saved these as a document at the moment.
Summary
The label functionality of OpenOffice is certainly not as slick as MS Office. It seemed very difficult to save the labels out to a single document. The end result was 10 separate single page documents that each need to be edited as there are blank fields to be removed, they then need to be printed separately (With Word, you can create your merged document, edit it and then send to print in one fluid step).
Well, we only really make these labels once a year so it's no big issue for us. Getting it all worked out took about 3 hours (which is about what it took me to figure out Word's Mail merge the first time).
In previous years, we have used our Outlook Contacts as source data for creating Envelope Labels, we have a category defined "Christmas Cards" which means we can simply merge our e-mail contact postal addresses out to a label format in word, print them and slap them on the envelopes.
Issue 1: Thunderbird doesn't support Categories - Arghhhh
Work Around 1: Export everything to a calc source sheet, edit out the unwanted addressess and then merge them into writer
Issue 2: Did they forget some functionality in the Open Office Mail Merge wizard? It only seems possible to use the wizard to merge to a letter format - Arghhh
Work Around 2: Discovered that you can add data fields inside the label dialog (you can also use Thunderbird Address Book directly as a data source). Managed to create the necessary labels for printing, saved these as a document at the moment.
Summary
The label functionality of OpenOffice is certainly not as slick as MS Office. It seemed very difficult to save the labels out to a single document. The end result was 10 separate single page documents that each need to be edited as there are blank fields to be removed, they then need to be printed separately (With Word, you can create your merged document, edit it and then send to print in one fluid step).
Well, we only really make these labels once a year so it's no big issue for us. Getting it all worked out took about 3 hours (which is about what it took me to figure out Word's Mail merge the first time).
posted by solomalee at 23:00
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