mike scott wrote:
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.
You can create templates that can be reused each time you want to use
mail merge. That way, you only have to go through all the fields one
time to set up conditional processing.
I assume you are aware that you can put more than one field in a line of
text. The trick is to have your database fields properly normalized.
Then it is easy to include or exclude fields based on conditional
factors. That will easily handle your concern about idiosyncratic UK
addresses.
I haven't the time and this isn't the proper forum for a dialogue on
data normalization, but even a minimal exposure to the concept will help
to resolve what you perceive as shortcomings in OOo and mail merge.
There are numerous tutorials available that can be found by a google
search on that two word phrase.
Doug
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