5 ms·
While I appreciate effort put into making the interface prettier, one of the things that really detracts from LibreOffice and why I almost invariably end up ins
by chops 12y ago
While I appreciate effort put into making the interface prettier, one of the things that really detracts from LibreOffice and why I almost invariably end up installing MS Word for clients is the confusing way which the mail merge system is designed in LibreOffice. I've done it enough times now to know mostly how to get it working for myself, but there's no way in hell I'll try teaching a client how to do a mail merge in LibreOffice.
And even myself, I've had to completely scrap documents I'm working on because LibreOffice gets confused and does what I'm assuming is some kind of join, resulting in tons of duplicates when it comes time to print[1]. It's almost certainly user error, but where to fix it is unclear. That whole mechanism needs to be gutted and reworked.
But I continue to deal with it because Linux is my primary environment and it's good enough in everything else I have to deal with.
[1] something like multiple data sources used accidentally, even though both point at the same source file, and even after wiping all data sources, the issue remains.
- fafner 12y agoThere are actually changes to mail merge in this release. But it seems it is about performance and not the UI. https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-01-29-under-the-hood-4-4.html#perf-mailmerge https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-01-29-under-the-...
- chris_wot 12y agoThat's not good at all. If you log a bug, you should be able to send over the documents in confidence - this sounds pretty bad.
- ForHackernews 12y agoHuh. This is an interesting example of a feature that's very important to some people, and utterly irrelevant to others. I had never even heard of "mail merge" in the context of word processing software, only mass-emailers, and it would never have occurred to me that anyone was using desktop word processing software to run their paper-mailing campaigns.
- chops 12y agoIt's pretty common in the small business world, or even printing envelopes/labels for christmas cards, wedding invitations, etc. Most recently, I'm using it for rapid prototyping of cards for a board game I'm making, but I do also use it for small direct mailing campaigns (under 200 destinations) for my business.
- epascarello 12y agoThink snail mail, not email.
- scholia 12y agoSome businesses use Microsoft Office for business processes that go far beyond Mail-Merge, but are essentially unknown to people who don't work for large corporations. Have a look at the half-dozen Microsoft Office programs you've never used, and that many people have not even heard of. This is one reason why it took Munich a whole decade to switch most (but not all) users from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice, and they probably lost a ton of money on the switch (ie if you honestly counted lost productivity, which I'd bet is still being lost). I'd also guess that a German city's use of Microsoft Office is probably pretty trivial compared to an American Fortune 50 corporation. If someone wants to do a PhD on this, I'd love to read it ;-)
- digikata 12y agoYes, and I'd add while it's possible to use a spreadsheet based data source for the mail merge - you have to go through a fairly obscure path to set it up. And most people asking me for help with mail merge have their data in spreadsheet form.
- EpiMath 12y agoExactly. This is the reason I keep an old laptop with MS Word running for myself. Fix this and I could go 100% LO.