A less developer oriented post today. I find there to be an incredible lack of tutorials on how to mail merge in LibreOffice. So I made my own.
How to Mail Merge with LibreOffice
This tutorial assumes you have an xls or ods file with data you want to “merge” to a document.
-
Ensure you have proper headers on your spreadsheet and save it. Take note where you save it to!
-
Click Edit, then Exchange Database… Then click Browse. Select the file you just made
Why is it named exchange database?
-
Click View, Data sources (or press F4)
-
On the left is a list of data sources. These should include the file you just made. Select it, then Tables, then Sheet1 (or the name of the sheet you want)
-
You will see the data from the spreadsheet. Click and drag the column you want into your document. For example if I wanted First Name, I would click and drag the First Name column title and not an individual cell like Bob. You will notice it appears gray in your document. You are free to cut and paste it or change the formatting. These words will be replaced with the data in your spreadsheet.
-
Click Tools, Mail Merge Wizard or click the envelope icon in data sources. This stuff is mostly stupid and deals with preformatted address blocks, etc. I’ve never under any circumstance use them but you will need to disable them all. Work through each step and click next to continue:
-
Select starting Document: Select current document.
-
Select document type: In this example we intend to print or save the file so select Letter.
-
-
Insert address block: Ensure “This document shall contain an address block” is unchecked.
-
Create salutation: Ensure “This document should contain salutation” is unchecked.
-
Edit document: By clicking the left and right arrow we can preview each page.
-
Personalize document: This screen shows us the finished document which is editable.
-
Save, print or send: What do you want to do this the finished document? You may save it, print it, or email it (may require additional setup). Save merged document will save the finished multi page document and Save starting document will save your template for later use.
Thank-you so much! I’ve been trying to perform an MM for the last hour and failing miserably. All I wanted to do was add a personalized salutation to the start of the letter, and the MM Wizard was useless in this regard. (Although it seemed to be letting me create the salutation, it failed to substitute in the database fields.) The OO/LO documentation was not helpful here either. Your method of dragging database fields directly into the document works.
Thanks again!
Star Office, Open Office and now LibreOffice. Great programs – absolutely crap mail merge. It’s been just as bad for at least 10 years and I don’t know why they don’t fix it. There’s never any decent information available – apart from yours – and the “salutations” block is a sad joke. I’ve worked in many offices and mail merge is a routine job – if this isn’t sorted this freeware will never be able to compete which is a great shame as it’s the only feature holding it back.
Hi again – I’ve just tried using your method and it works! Briliant – I very nearly went back to using MS Office yesterday. I’ve emailed the team that develop LibreOffice to see what they have to say.
David – I contacted the people at LibreOffice and they politely suggested that due to lack of funding if I wanted to re-write the help page myself I could. So I did. It should be changed in the near future to reflect your brilliant (simple) solution. Thank you so much again. I can understand LibreOffice’s problem as those help pages go back 15 years and there are an awful lot of them …
Cool. I think the most frustrating issue is that in some screens you can select an xls file for your source but in others only database files. Wish I had time to hack on Libreoffice code.