I didn't know I'd be able to use the Nancy Drew analogy again so soon.
Nancy always gets a tip from a "suspicious event" that something's up. Someone nearly runs her off the road, or Hannah Gruen gives her the mail one morning and there's an odd letter. In the current versions of the book, it's entirely possible that someone will post information on her blog.
Which brings me to my point: The Mystery of the Missing Mail Merge.
Cast your minds back, if you will, to OpenOffice.org 1.4 or so. Back in those days, I taught people to do mail merges with the Address Autopilot. There was another approach, too: very simple and easy. Does this look familiar to anyone?
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It was a nice little mail merge tool that let you select your starting document, your data source, and the fields to insert. You got to it by choosing, logically, Tools > Mail Merge.
But where is it now? Click on the Tools menu and all you see is the option for the Mail Merge Wizard, a powerful -- but needless to say -- fairly complex, tool. (If you've read my article on that tool, you'll see that there is in fact an implicit cry of "I just want a nice simple mail merge tool!")
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Now, you might think that since you can't find the the old simple Mail Merge tool from 1.4 in any of the menus or toolbars, it had entirely disappeared.
Of course, you'd be dead wrong. Louis, who submitted a comment to my blog, was clever and not at all wrong. He's the OpenOffice.org migration czar for his organization and discovered that the old mail merge was, in fact, still there. He has his users add it back on. They like it a lot, which makes sense because it's simple, straightforward and gets the job done.
Now, this clearly begs the question:
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"Why take a nice, useful mail merge tool off the Tools menu when it's so helpful?" I guess because it might be confusing, but a name change and a little online help could have smoothed the way.
The other question is "How do I get to it and how do I use it?" I can answer that one far more certainly.
Adding the Simple Mail Merge Tool to a Menu or Toolbar
The first step is to get the tool back in the navigation toolbar/menu where it belongs.
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Using the Simple Mail Merge
You've added it. Now how the heck do you use it? Very easily.
That's all there is to it. It's pretty simple. If you need advanced features, by all means use the Mail Merge Wizard, and if you're more of a do it yourselfer, there's nothing wrong with choosing View > Data Sources and dragging the fields onto the document yourself.
Thanks again to Louis, to posting on my blog in the first place to the fact that the mail merge was not in fact missing; just sitting alone in the dark and waiting to be used. (If you happen to learn about the location of some gold bullion, however, please e-mail me directly instead.)
Solveig Haugland has worked as an instructor, course developer, author and technical writer in the high-tech industry for 15 years, for employers including Microsoft Great Plains, Sun Microsystems,and BEA. Currently, Solveig is a StarOffice and OpenOffice.org instructor, author, and freelance technical writer. She is also co-author, with Floyd Jones, of three books: Staroffice 5.2 Companion, Staroffice 6.0 Office Suite Companion and OpenOffice.Org 1.0 Resource Kit, published
by Prentice Hall PTR. Her fourth book, on OpenOffice.org 2.0, is coming this summer. For
more tips on working in OpenOffice, visit Solveig's OpenOffice blog.
