OpenOffice.org OpenOffice - 3.3 Manual de usuario descargar pdf (Pagina 302)

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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

A 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 297.

Figure 297: Spreadsheet data source

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