Creating the Data Source

Apache OpenOffice 4.1 Writer Guide

Chapter 11: Using Mail Merge

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• What is Mail Merge?
• Creating the Data Source
• Registering a Data Source
• Creating a Form Letter
  • Editing Merged Documents
• Printing Mailing Labels
  • Preparing for Printing
  • Removing Blank Lines from Labels
  • Printing
  • Editing a Saved File of Mailing Labels
• Printing Envelopes
  • Setting up Envelopes for Printing
  • Merging and Printing the Envelopes
  • Creating an Envelope Template
• Using the Mail Merge Wizard to Create a Form Letter
  • Step 1: Select Starting Document
  • Step 2: Select Document Type
  • Step 3: Insert Address Block
    • Selecting the Data Source (address list)
    • Selecting the Address Block
    • Matching the Fields
  • Step 4: Create Salutation
  • Step 5: Adjust Layout
  • Step 6: Edit Document and Insert Extra Fields
  • Step 7: Personalize Documents
  • Step 8: Save, Print or Send

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Creating the Data Source

A data source is a database containing the name and address records (and optionally other information) from which a mailing list can be created. Although you can produce and print mailing labels and envelopes without using a data source, in most cases using one is the optimal approach. This chapter assumes that you are using a data source.

Apache OpenOffice can access a wide variety of such sources, including spreadsheets, text files and databases such as MySQL. If the information to be used in the mail merge is currently in a format that AOO 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, Gender, Points. A sample data source is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Spreadsheet data source