On 8 Aug 2005 at 8:54, Doug Thompson wrote:
> Vaughn L. Reid III wrote:
> >
> > The issue of blank fields in mail merges has been raised several times
> > in issuezilla since version 1.0.3, but it keeps getting reclassified as
> > an enhancement. I have to disagree that this is an enhancement. The
...
> > Luckily for you Mike, you can program in perl and get a properly
> > formatted address list that way.
...
> There was a response to the matter of how to handle blank fields posted
> in the last couple of days. Perhaps you could read the reference
> (http://documentation.openoffice.org/HOW_TO/word_processing/writer2_EN.pdf)
> and explain which part of it doesn't work for you. That would be a much
> more useful input to IZ and the list.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but basically that document says to go through
every field to be printed and do a "if empty, make this a hidden
paragraph", and to repeat exactly the same for every merge operation.
In my "printed address book" case, I'm using perhaps a dozen fields or
more. It might be OK for a one-off, but I hope you are not seriously
advocating that I go through that whole palaver every time I want a
printout.
And in any case, it's not general enough - if you have multiple fields
to appear on a single line, you can't make them vanish individually
without losing the whole line.
For example, to take a prehaps overly simple case, you might want to
address whole families if appropriate. Consider a database that has
parents' names and their children's, the kids' entries being blank if
there are none. Now generate address labels containing for example
(for a full family)
"Peter & Anne Jones; Amy & Arthur"
(no children)
"Robert & Marcia Quincey"
(and a single guy from the same db, wife and kids blank entries)
"Tom Cobley"
You get the same problem potentially within the rest of an address -
full addresses at least in the UK can be highly idiosyncratic.
I don't think it can be done within OOo. In fact, I'm sure it can't.
Likewise in my address book case, it's good to be able to put a
separator between items in lists of things if appropriate. OOo simply
cannot do this properly if any field may be empty.
So to summarize, the procedure outlined
(*) is tedious
(*) is repetitive
(both of which are reasons we use computers in the first place)
(*) is error prone and can't be stored for re-use
(*) and doesn't do the general job anyway.
I like OOo very much, don't get me wrong. But I get very frustrated
with problems like this that have no good workaround.
--
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[EMAIL PROTECTED] Mike Scott, Harlow, Essex, England
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