Hello, I wrote a blog post<http://davidmburke.com/2011/08/10/mail-merge-in-libreoffice/>awhile ago about mail merge in LibreOffice. As with most of my posts it is rather critical, so I apologize for that. It's a very popular post and I think it highlights there are issues with the official documentation.
In my opinion, based on working with schools and seeing the response to my blog, the official documentation is difficult to follow for the most common use cases. I'll start by defining use cases I think of. - User needs to print labels for envelopes or sticky labels - User needs to insert variables in a document from a spreadsheet (ods, xls, etc) The issues I see 1. Searching Mail Merge<https://help.libreoffice.org/index.php?search=mail+merge&title=Special%3ASearch> yields a good number of articles. These range of various quality. Not one of them includes a full walk through to go from a odt and ods file to a mail merged document. 2. Most users (I have only anecdotal evidence) do not know what a database is. LO docs talks about a lot about database sources. In my experience a user has a xls or ods file and wants the fields to go into a document. They are not thinking in terms of data sources and certainly not "Exchange Databases" 3. Exchange Databases are a critical feature as explained in my blog post. I see no way of using a xls file as a data source without clicking Edit, Exchange Databases. However I cannot find this documented anywhere in LO docs. 4. Possibly more of a bug - but as Juanito points out on my blog, having an address block that doesn't print blank lines on a label is absurdly difficult. I think this is a common use case. I suppose however we could say this is a feature LO is lacking and not a documentation issue. Juanito's work around is quite creative. However documenting deficiencies would be useful. I'd be happy to help contribute to cleaning up things. Let me know what you think. Carl Taylor commented that he attempted to rewrite docs but I don't see where this went, if it happened at all. Best, David Burke davidmburke.com -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to documentation+h...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/documentation/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
