Why is LO making .odb files whenever I data merge in Writer? and can I make it stop?
I have a number of data merged documents I print each week/month. EG, Receipt.odt and Bill.odt . Each week I sub out last week's spreadsheet of recipients for a spreadsheet of this new week's recipients. To do this, I open Receipt.odt, go to Edit->Exchange Database, then I browse to the spreadsheet I want, and Define. That's easy enough.
What I don't understand is why the list of "available databases" keeps growing and you can't remove/delete them in that window. There is no value in this list for me; I never have any reason whatsoever to return to those old lists, they just get in the way accumulating there. Some of them are only 4 or 5 lines long, seems weird to call them a "database" at all. Worse, I just noticed today a ton of .odb files in my documents folder -- a real mess I did not notice growing under my nose. I recognize immediately that they have the same name as the .ods files I use to do data merges in Writer. Why the heck must these .odb files be generated and can I stop it from continuing to happen? Can I have them automatically go to the trash -- will that eliminate the list in Edit->Exchange Databases? I do keep the .ods files for reference, but I don't also need the same data in a .odb. I don't think it even asked me where I want to save them, it seems to have just dumped them in my Documents folder.
Can I just delete these .odb files? Is there a simpler way to do data merges that isn't going to generate unwanted files? Am I making this more complicated than it has to be? Or is having the .odb files auto-dumped to the trash going to solve this for me? If so, how do I do that?
Mail merge expects a database file. You cannot use a spreadsheet directly. So LibreOffice generates such database file for you, when you try to use a spreadsheet. Perhaps you use only exact one spreadsheet and its associated database file for mail merge. Each week you delete the old recipients and fill with the new recipients, and do not Exchange Database?
I want to save the old spreadsheets for reference. So that doesn't solve the problem.