On 10 Dec 2005 at 9:07, Jean Hollis Weber wrote:
...
> I don't think you're doing anything wrong. I've never been able
> to get hidden paragraphs to work, not just when using mail merge
> but in any situation. I've successfully used hidden text, and
> conditional text, and hidden sections, but not hidden paragraphs.
> I haven't tried doing it in the latest version (2.0.1RC2), though.

In response to the OP's query, I tried both hidden sections and hidden 
paragraphs.  The sections do seem to work.  I couldn't get hidden 
paragraphs to work at all -- just succeeded in crashing OOo (nice 
recovery mechanism though!)

I posted on this subject quite a while ago, without any terribly 
positive response; but after hearing from the OP I'll risk annoying 
people and say it again: there is a need for arbitrary  sections of 
'stuff'- not just paragraphs, nor whole lines but sections of lines, 
and potentially other objects like included graphics, to be hideable or 
to have alternate renderings.  An example that springs to mind is where 
you might want a comma-separated list of, say, phone numbers on a line, 
any of which may be null (eg, home, work, mobile numbers). One might 
want to either suppress the insertion and the corresponding separator, 
or replace with alternate text, giving resulting lines like 
eg
fred bloggs: +44 1279 1234, +44 1502 9876, +44 776 260999
jo soap: +44 432 8888
or
fred bloggs: +44 1279 1234, +44 1502 9876, +44 776 260999
jo soap: +44 432 8888, (no work), (no mobile)

The OP's issue of hidden lines is just a special case of this; the 
general case appears to be totally impossible at present.

Given the care that's obviously gone into OOo in general, and given the 
importance of mail merge to many users, I'm really surprised and 
disappointed that m/m still has such a limited featureset and is still 
so opaque to use.  I can well see that some users could be permanently 
dissuaded from using it because of these problems.
-- 
various incoming sites blocked because of spam; see 
http://www.scottsonline.org.uk for a list and openpgp crypto key
(key fingerprint 2ACC 9F21 5103 F68C 7C32 9EA8 C949 81E1 31C9 1364)
[EMAIL PROTECTED]    Mike Scott, Harlow, Essex, England


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Reply via email to