What I'm Learning While Training This Week: Suppressing Blank Lines in Mail Merge

So I'm in class, teaching merrily away, when I'm asked about mail merges and addresses.  Let's say some of your addresses are like this:

Tom Bosley
401 Main
Kalispell, MT 59901

And some of them are like this:

John Travolta
409 East Mulberry
Apartment 42
Dallas, TX, 87599

So you need your mail merge to look like this to accommodate the 2-line addresses

Firstname  Lastname
Address1
Address2
City, State  ZIP

But--here's the deal--you don't want the envelope you're sending to Tom to look like this. But it will, since his Address2 value is blank.

Tom Bosley
401 Main
                                        [his Address2 value is nothing, but there's a space for it]
Kalispell, MT 59901

What do you do to tell your mail merges, "Just skip that blank line if there's nothing in the field"?

If you're me, you google and you find this post from Tom Haws on the oooforum.org site.  Now, he does say that he can't get the lines to hide successfully every time. You might have better luck since if it's this twitchy then it's probably environmental.

So give it a try. Here's the tutorial.

You might also try the approach of reading this document, pointed to by Jean Hollis Weber, a hard-core OpenOffice.org expert. She uses hidden sections.

I haven't tried either approach myself yet so let me know how they work for you.

Comments

[Louis Roederer]

Solveig,

I have tried inserting a hidden section. I have found that the preview looks correct (where you see only the field names), but when you actually do the mail merge, the blank lines come back. I'm getting rather frustrated with it, but I'm gonna keep tryin'...

[Louis Roederer]

OK. I was able to get this whole thing to work using the Jean Weber method. It should be noted that you can layout your label manually (drag and drop from data source) if you don't like the layout box in the labels dialog (I don't). Then SAVE. You have to use the Mail Merge Wizard, because the secret Mail Merge won't work :-( Skip right to step 8 in the wizard and print from there. I got it to work fine in Windows and Linux. I feel sorry for the average user trying to figure this mess out. How about a "Suppress blank lines" check box?!

[Solveig]

I too think this should be a little freakin' easier. I realized however that there is a Suppress Blank Lines checkbox....but it's in the Mongo Mail Merge Wizard (Tools > Mail Merge Wizard). Which is a huge pain to set up. BUT someone can set it up then just create a template and make it available to users.

So I think that's the best approach.

[Louis Roederer]

A template is great if everyone uses the same database and labels. We use lots of different databases and label sizes, which complicates things somewhat. Luckily, I can do a label merge in my sleep now.

Also, you were in Kentucky and didn't stop in to see me?! ;-)

[Solveig]

Sorry--apparently there's a small contingent out that way! If the client has me out again, we'll go take in a horse race, or have lunch, or something.

[Solveig]

Sorry--apparently there's a small contingent out that way! If the client has me out again, we'll go take in a horse race, or have lunch, or something.

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