A little mundane but I had to print out fifty personalized letters for our music studio. The quick solution, of course, is to use mail merge. However, for the life of me, I could quite figure out OpenOffice.org's mail merge function, not even with the Mail Merge Wizard.
Rather than bang my head on that, I decided to use Abiword instead.
Even on Abiword, mail merge isn't nearly as intuitive as I would like it. For one thing, the actual merging must be done on the command line. Fortunately, there's a good instruction page on mail merge over at the official Abiword web site.
In a nutshell, here are the steps I took for mail merge:
where mergeme.csv is the source data, mergeme.ps is the output file, and mergeme.abw is the document with the merge fields.
This will produce a postscript file, mergeme.ps, which can be viewed prior to printing.
Rather than bang my head on that, I decided to use Abiword instead.
Even on Abiword, mail merge isn't nearly as intuitive as I would like it. For one thing, the actual merging must be done on the command line. Fortunately, there's a good instruction page on mail merge over at the official Abiword web site.
In a nutshell, here are the steps I took for mail merge:
- Create a CSV (comma separated value) file of the source data (in my case, student names and parent names). I did this in Gnumeric and simply exported out.
- On the Abiword menu, click on
Insert->Mail Merge Field.... This will bring up the mail merge dialog box. - On the dialog box, click on "Open File" and select the source data. This will then make the fields available for selection.
- Insert fields at the proper locations.
- Save the file.
- To actually run the merge:
abiword -m mergeme.csv -p mergeme.ps mergeme.abwwhere mergeme.csv is the source data, mergeme.ps is the output file, and mergeme.abw is the document with the merge fields.
This will produce a postscript file, mergeme.ps, which can be viewed prior to printing.
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