Getting Started With Mail Merges, Business Cards, and More

Getting Started With Mail Merges, Business Cards, and More

OpenOffice.org lets you send letters to everyone on your customer list, business cards with cool graphics in the background, labels, faxes. They're pretty easy to use, especially if you use the AutoPilots. (Choose File > AutoPilot > Letter.)

This section covers:

• Mail Merge and Business Card QuickStart

• The Basics for Mail Merges (Data Source Data), and Business Cards (Fixed Data)

• A Little Background on Mail Merges

Mail Merge and Business Card QuickStart

To dive in quickly, pick your learning stylelearn by doing or learn by readingand follow the steps in the corresponding section.

Learn by Doing

Walkthrough of mail merges

Choose File > AutoPilot > Letter and walk through all the windows . Use the included Bibliography data source, or your own.

Walkthrough of plain old fixed data

Then choose File > New > Business Cards, fill out the tabs, and create the cards.

Do-it-yourself mail merges

Then open a new document and choose View > Data Sources. Expand the Bibliography down to the Table level, so that you see the bibliography entries, and drag one of the field headings like Name into the document. If you can't get it to work, A) save the document, B) click the Edit File icon in the function bar, and C) click Edit File again.

Do-it-yourself plain old fixed data

In the same document, click on the upper left corner of where the data is displayed, and drag it to the document. Import as text.

Learn by Reading

1. Read The Basics for Mail Merges (Data Source Data), and Business Cards (Fixed Data) on page 359.

2. Take a look at A Little Background on Mail Merges on page 360.

3. Then pick your procedure and go.

The Basics for Mail Merges (Data Source Data), and Business Cards (Fixed Data)

This will help you understand how things work.

Two Kinds of Documents: Mail Merges and Fixed Data

Just as there are two kinds of people in this world (those who understand boolean numbers , and those who don't), there are two kinds of documents you can print in this chapter:

• Mail merge documents, like a holiday newsletter to all the relatives you really hate, or labels for everyone you need to ship your highly popular grail-shaped beacon to. The recipients' names are sucked out of the database or spreadsheet or wherever the list of names and addresses is stored. We'll refer to it henceforth as the data source .

  See Figure 10-1 on page 360 and Figure 10-2 on page 361.

  Figure 10-1. Example of fields in a mail merge letter

  

  Figure 10-2. A finished mail merge for three address records, printed to Writer files

  

• Fixed data documents: business cards for yourself or any one other person, or return address labels likewise for only one person. Like one label or business card document, saying "Rob van der Womplet of Womplet Graphics can be reached at [e-mail]." This contains the information of one person. The name is sucked out of fixed data , just normal data stored in the program that you can stick in a business card document.

  See Figure 10-49 on page 393.

  Figure 10-49. An example of the business card created using the Business Cards window

  

Basics for Mail Merge Documents

Steps for making mail merge documents:

1. Set up the data. This is all covered in Setting Up Data to Use in Mail Merge Documents and Business Cards on page 362.

2. Create the document you want to print and bring the data into it. There are lots of ways to do this; it all depends on what you want to do, and how much formatting and work you want to do.

   • If this is your first time, check out Creating Mail Merge Letters and Faxes With Data Sources Using AutoPilots on page 367.

   • You might also want to look at Creating Your Own Mail Merge Documents on page 378.

3. Print . It's not your ordinary File > Print, so follow the instructions in Printing on page 399.

Basics for Fixed Data Documents Like Business Cards

Steps for making fixed data documents:

1. Set up the data. This is all covered in Setting Up Fixed Data for Business Cards or Labels on page 363.

2. Create the document you want to print and bring the data into it. There are lots of ways to do this. Check out Creating Business Cards and Labels Using Fixed Data on page 389 and Envelopes on page 384.

3. Print . Just File > Print like usual.

A Little Background on Mail Merges

If you're a little fuzzy on the whole mail merge thing, we hope this section will help.

A mail merge involves inserting the names of data source fields into your document. For example, in the heading of a letter, the inserted data source fields would look something like Figure 10-1:

These fields form a link to your data source (the list of names and addresses or similar data), pull the information out of it, and put it into your document. You can drag and drop these fields from your data source into your document, or get them into a new document based on a template, using an AutoPilot that walks you through the process.

Then you print the mail merge, and you get a copy of the document for everyone in the data source. The results are illustrated in Figure 10-2.

A single group of information in a data source is called a record . A record can include a lot of information, such as a person's first name, last name, address, phone number, email address, spouse's name, children's names, and whether or not you've already sent them a Christmas card.

If you do a mail merge using a one-page letter, all the relevant information in a single record is inserted onto the page. A new page is created for each record used in the database.

You can send mail merges directly to your printer, email them, or you can send them to files, where you can open them and print them out later.

Note

Remember that mail merge printing isn't like regular printing. First, you use a procedure in this section to create a document, from an AutoPilot or from scratch, specifying the data source you want. Then you don't choose File > Print. You choose File > Form Letter, as described in Printing on page 399. By doing this you're saying "Yes, I really do want to print from that data source," and you get to specify a few printing options like filtering before you print.