Print in a series of addresses from a database with OpenOffice Writer and Base
Caution
This article was published more than a year ago, there may have been developments.
Please take this into account.
Today we give you a little advice to all employees of the commercial offices which often ends meet have to deal with bills of pending to be sent to various firms. We automate the process of writing addresses on envelopes.
The technique of printing in series “fishing” data from a database was called at the time of the first versions of Office “Mail Merge“.
Some accounting programs allow you to export addresses of the various companies in format XLS, RTF or better yet CSV. If our program gives us this possibility we are spared the rewriting of the various addresses, in our case the addresses we have to write them from scratch.
We begin learn from OpenOffice the this Annex. This is a model portfolio that can come in handy at other times except this tutorial.
Open the envelope template press the F4 key the select from the menu “Show” – “Data Source“. In all probability, since the database with addresses that are not yet created, we will have an error message like this that we should implicitly create a database.

Clicking with the right mouse button on “Addresses” choose “Database registered“.

I was already created a couple, who had not yet made will nonetheless find the model of OpenOffice as the only choice.

Click on “Fresh“, and connect the sheet we are laying out to our database (someone will remember the tutorial “Create a directory with OpenOffice Base“).
Now that we have connected our database we have to do that indicate “Writer” where to insert the fields right (Att.ne, Company, Address, etc..). Click “Ctrl + F2” or go on “Enter” – “Command field” – “More” and select the field correct in our database.

We put all of our fields in an orderly way, and we should get this result:

At the launch of the OpenOffice print “will notice” that the source data is external (un database) and ask if the room number is just what we want to do.


In case we have already prepared all the envelopes into the printer we can directly start the command, if instead we only want to prepare the work for the press, but throw the same at a later time we will Click on file, and confirm.
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