Queries in OpenOfice.org Mail Merge: how to print only documents for the records you want, in the order you want them

I hate it when I blithely skip by fantastic built-in features.

No more skipping by.

So you've got 2000 employees, or members, or whatever. You need to send out a letter reminding people to, oh, sign up for benefits, or renew their membership, or maybe it's just a congratulatory letter for some people who have five years of service now and are going to get that sterling silver ice bucket they've always wanted. Or let's say you need to print labels for everyone but you need to do it in order by zip code or the people at the post office are going to be very annoyed.

You don't need to set up a query ahead of time in Base or in Calc. You don't need to go into Base or Calc and sort the information. You could, it would be fine, but it's more work than you need to do.

Just specify what you want, when you print.

You know how to print a mail merge letter, envelope document, or label document. You choose File > Print, click Yes in that little window that asks you about a form letter, and you get the print window.

Check out the top row of icons.

 

Sorting

Here's what you get when you click the Sort icon. Just choose to sort by a field, up or down, then others if you need to. Just like the sort in Calc.

 

Or if you just want a quick sort-by-one-field thing, click on  column of your choice, then click the A>Z or Z>A icon to sort ascending or descending.

Filtering

To use the quick autofilter, click on a particular cell in a row. One single value, like the city where one person is from. Click the AutoFilter icon; you'll get all the records that match that value.

 

Results:

 

If you want a little more control over the filter, click the Standard Filter icon. It's just like the standard one in Calc. NOTE: The AND/OR fields in the 2nd and 3rd rows aren't enabled until you select something to filter by in those rows. It looks like they're not available, but they are.

 

And results.

 

To turn off the standard filter, click the Apply Filter icon; to get the filter back on, click it again.

You can also remove any filter or sort with this icon.

When you're done, just print as usual; I recommend selecting File, and Save as Single Document. Click OK and name the output file.

This creates a perfectly ordinary Writer document with all the fields merged, one copy of your original mail merge document for each record you chose to print by. 

Then you open that Writer document, check it over a bit to be sure it's what you want, then print that as you would any other Writer document. (The illustration cuts out the bottom half of each page for space reasons; you would have an entire page for each person.)

Comments

[Julio A. Cartaya]

Congratulations. Yours is a very focused site, with outstanding articles.

One use of Mail Merge I have not seen addressed is that of complex reports, which arise sometimes in evaluating feature-rich objects (land surveys, building inspections, medical checkups, security audits, etc.)

Those reports contain
1. generic text that explains data (definitions, context, etc)
2. the data (numeric, dates, text, graphics, ...) that must be imported
3. Input from a field expert, with comments specific to the imported data

These are different from mailing letters or labels because the emphasis is not in merging data into a simple document 40 times, but in merging once into a complex document data from 40 different sources (database tables, calc sheets, files), just prior to editing it.

Care to comment about this use sometime?

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[Torrent search engine]

This is a very tedious procedure. And all these frames are not printable on my HP B/W inkjetprinter. I sincerely hope thate Open Office 3 will present us an efficient wizzard for all printing from Open Office software.

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