We recently moved from OO to LO (24.2.0.3 X85_64 / Windows 10) and this was my first attempt at a mail merge. I’m not impressed. Even with the option to “print automatically inserted pages” turned OFF, it printed a page between each document. That means the company that bills me for my copier will be charging me double. I found a couple of mail-merge help articles on the web, but they’re quite outdated, the most recent being from 2017. The tips have been related to unchecking that particular box in Options, which I’ve done, but the extra pages still printed.
Another issue is that I created the M-M, inserting the address block, mapping the fields, and omitting a salutation. The database is an .ODS file in the same directory as the document (.ODT). I tried to print it immediately, but I could see in the printer dialog box indicated there were twice as many pages to print as there should be, so I canceled the print job. I unchecked the option to print auto-inserted pages, then tried to print again, but the print dialog still indicated the extra inserted pages. I verified that the printer was set to single sided, but the page count stayed at double the number of documents I wanted to print.
I verified that the document was, in fact, only one page (no text overflow) and that it was built on the correct page size (US Letter). I thought perhaps I needed to exit the program and restart it for the options to take effect. I closed the document, relaunched it, and verified that the option was still turned off for printing auto-inserted pages. When I tried to print again, it could not find the database.
I went several rounds trying to reconnect the database, which it would not let me do so intuitively because it would only show .ODB files (that’s a bug) and not .ODS files. My data original source still appears on the list but if I try to select it and hit “Apply” or “OK”, it returns me to the document, but still throws up an error that it can’t connect to the database.
I finally figured out the “Exchange Database” function to reselect the .ODS. That might not be the best name for that function, as I assumed that referred to an actual MS Exchange file of some type. I only tried it because people online who had run into M-M problems had talked about it. I had to kill the existing address block before that worked and create a new one. There was a point when trying to select the data source (before trying the “Exchange Database” function) that actually locks up LO cold and it has to be killed by the task manager.
Basically, a 10 minute project turned into two hours. Is this how LO works or is this a bug? Because now I have three copies of the data source with different names and if I pull the document up to print it again, I’ll end up with having to define a 4th data source for the same file. I do these a couple times a month, and I’ll have to go back to OO if LO can’t keep track of data sources and avoid printing the extra pages. This was a 51-piece merge, we do some that are 1500 pages and I can’t be printing 1500 blank pages each time I do one of the big jobs.
