Mailmerge page throws

I have a Base database, which is updated frequently. Regularly I need to produce updated reports from the database. An SQL query pulls together the relevant info, and I use Mailmerge referencing the query to add additional text and formatting not held in the database, and print to file. This all works fine apart from one thing: the mailmerge output has paragraph markers with an insert page break before set after each record, which in this case I don’t want. I want the output records to appear sequentially, with just an ordinary paragraph break between them.

This wouldn’t matter much if I could select the whole document, go to Format/Paragraph/Text flow and clear the check box next to Insert break, and it would apply to all selected paragraphs, but for some reason this doesn’t work. The marker is cleared only for the first selected paragraph. All others stay unchanged. The listing has several hundred records, so it isn’t feasible to select them one by one and clear the check boxes individually.

I have an ugly fix for this: I replace all the paragraph markers (using a regular expression) by some string that doesn’t otherwise occur (">>>" is good in my case), then do another regular expression replace of >>> by \n. But the time has come that I need to hand this over to someone non-technical to continue, and I don’t really want to have to tell them about regular expressions.

Is there a way either to stop Mailmerge inserting the page breaks, or to do a “clean” global edit of the output?

I’m currently using LibreOffice 6.0.6.2 on Win10, but this problem has existed for around 10 years on all versions of LibreOffice and OpenOffice that I’ve run over that time. I recall the OpenOffice Mailmerge output was different in detail, which meant slightly different regular expressions, but the issue was the same.

I have encountered the same problem and wondering if this issue was ever solved?

Does anyone have a work-around?

The primary question is: Is there a way either to stop Mailmerge inserting the page breaks?

Sorry for posting this as an answer but I cannot edit the OP’s query.

In the Print dialog, go to the LibreOffice Writer tab and uncheck the Print automatically inserted blank pages.

Hi,
for another project similar to @slithytove’s I created this work-around:

  • Set a different paragraph style for the first paragraph - if you use the text body paragraph you could generate another one based on this like text body page break
  • mail merge into a single Writer document (lots of pages in one document)
  • start SEARCH&REPLACE and find every text body page break style (they are selected then)
  • leave SEARCH&REPLACE (text body page break style paragraphs are still selected)
  • menu Format: deselect page break in text body page break style (and leave)

(Probably this method has to be done more than once; in special cases.)

So…

… could be possible for a range of pages…