Hello, I'm a new subscriber, and if this is not the correct place to post my thoughts, please forgive and redirect me.
I just completed a LibreOffice survey that was linked to from omgubuntu.co.uk. The sury vey did not allow me to say as much as I would have liked due to its format, so I'd like to clarify a point or two. When the survey asked if I used Base frequently, I responded that I do not. However, this worried me that developers may interpret this as a reason to not devote any work to Base. But the thing is, I don't use Base much because I don't know yet how to use it the way I wan to use it. For example, I'd like to stop using Navicat Lite as a GUI front end to a local PostgreSQL server, and ideally replace it with LibreOffice Base if the latter allows me basic CRUD features such as drop-down select lists. And I'd prefer to use something off the shelf like LibreOffice so that I don't have to learn how to write my own web-based CRUD front-end. So I don't wish for developers to misinterpret the results of the rather simplistic survey, as some situations have additional meaning that cannot be expressed in such fairly boolean questions. Moreover, I went into the survey hoping I would be able to suggest my most desired feature to have further developed. Since I couldn't do that in the survey, I hoped I might be able to do it here. And it is on the subject of mail merges, or more broadly, just merges (I don't actually use this feature in Microsoft Word for anything mailing related). In the past (with OpenOffice), I've done basic web searches to find out how to replace MS Word (2003 edition) for the mail merges I do, but I've never come across any straightforward way to do this with LibreOffice. My request would be for the LibreOffice team to make this as painless as it is in MS Word 2003, in terms of both the design and implementation of the feature in the software, as well as providing a canonical and straightforward tutorial on how to use the improved feature. Ideally the latter would become the FIRST result in searching on any search engine, and be kept UP TO DATE. Let attach two screenshots to show how I use MS Word mail merge. In both cases the fields are being populated via an ODBC connection to a remote MySQL database. In the first case, Avery labels are populated to become shelf tags in a retail store. That means one 8x10 sheet of labels is not a full page of the same label, but each label is different, and if necessary, a second or even third page of labels is generated until all the rows selected from the database are rendered into Avery labels. In the second case, a weekly order list is generated in what looks like a datasheet view in MS Access or an Excel tabular format. Again, this spills over into as many pages as needed, but each row of the merged table is different. None of this is "address book" type fare, or full sheets of the same thing. It was very easy for me to do in MS Word, but I haven't a clue how to do these use cases in LibreOffice Writer. It's been easier to keep MS Word around, so for the time being I've given up. For all I know it is absurdly easy to do in LibreOffice, but this is not at all discoverable for me, in either the software UI, or in documentation. Kindest regards, Derrick -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
