Writer Guide

What is mail merge?

OpenOffice.org (OOo) Writer provides very useful features to create

and print:

• Multiple copies of a document to send to a list of different

recipients (form letters)

• Mailing labels

• Envelopes

All these facilities, though different in application, are based around

the concept of a registered “data source”, from which is derived the

variable address information necessary to their function.

This chapter describes the entire process. The steps include:

1) How to create and register a data source.

2) How to create and print form letters, mailing labels, and

envelopes.

3) Optionally, how to save the output in an editable file instead of

printing it directly.

Creating the data source

data source

is a database containing the name and address records

(and optionally other information) from which a mailing list may be

derived. Although you can create and print mailing labels and

envelopes without using a data source, in most cases using one is the

best approach. This chapter assumes that you are using a data source.

OOo can access a wide variety of data sources, including spreadsheets,

text files and databases such as MySQL, Adabas, and ODBC. If the

information to be used in the mail merge is currently in a format that

OOo cannot access directly, you need to convert it, for example by

exporting it to a comma-separated values (CSV) file.

For the following example we use a spreadsheet with the following

column (field) headers:

Title, First name, Last name, Address,

State/County, Country, Post Code, Sex, Points

. A sample data source is

shown in Figure 289.

Chapter 11 Using Mail Merge 341