Free web servers - CHAPTER 23 IN DEPTH: WRITER You can
CHAPTER 23 IN DEPTH: WRITER You can alter the styling of any cell using various icons on the Table toolbar, as well as the standard text formatting tools on the Formatting toolbar. The Table toolbar allows you to add borders to the cells and change the background colors. Alternatively, you can choose to remove all borders from the cells by clicking the Borders icon and then the No Borders option (note that gray borders will remain in place, but these are only for your convenience and won t appear in printouts). Mail Merging Mail merging refers to automatically applying a database of details, such as names and addresses, to a document, so that many personalized copies are produced. It s ordinarily used to create form letters for mailings. OpenOffice.org makes the procedure very easy, but it requires source data that will be merged into the document. As with Microsoft Word, you can either enter this data within Writer itself or choose to import data from a separate document. Unless you have enough knowledge of databases to connect one to OpenOffice.org (the program works with dBase and MySQL files, among others), you may want to input existing data in the form of a comma-separated value (CSV) text file. This is the simplest form of data file that is understood by the majority of office programs and databases. Here, we re going to look at entering the data within Writer, which is the best policy for smaller mail merge operations. You can then output the data as a CSV file, so you can use it again later. Here are the steps for using mail merge: 1. Select Tools . Mail Merge Wizard to start the wizard, as shown in Figure 23-6. 2. Specify your starting document, which is the document in which the merged data will appear. You can opt to use the current document, create a new document, open a document from file, or use a template as the basis for your file. 3. Choose the mail merge type. You can choose to create a merged e-mail (for sending to multiple recipients) or a merged letter. 4. You re asked to tell Writer about your data. Writer needs to know where to find the addresses that will be merged into the document. Click the Select Address List button. 5. In the window that appears, you have a number of options. You can raid your Evolution e-mail address book for the data, click Add to select an already existing data source (such as a database or CSV file), or create a data source from scratch. Choose to create a data source to enter the data in Writer. Note The fourth option for choosing a mail merge data source, Filter, allows you to filter the database source you select after clicking Add, so that you can import only specific data. To learn more about this technique, browse the OpenOffice.org Help file (click Help . OpenOffice.org Help) and search for Filtering . Data in Databases.