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Hope this is the right area for this question, it's a general "Should I" more than a "How do I".

We currently have a commercial software that offers, among many other things, a mail merge functionality to MS Word. However, we're looking for options to remove MS software, and the licensing fees that come with it. I've used openoffice personally in years past, and it seems to be a strong contender.

The mail merge functionality we offer is generally used to create letters or envelopes, and while often fairly simple, does contain some very advanced "hacks" like being able to merge rich text content and images (we save these to temporary files, put the path into a special tag in Word, then do post-merge processing on the Word document to bring them in). I need to have 100% functionality coverage to be able to switch products. Has anyone done any similar kind of processing on the document post-merge?

I see in the docs that there are Automation capabilities offered (this is how our current MS Word implementation works), and there's also an API reference. Has anyone used the two of these and have any recommendations one way or the other for mail merge?

Any of these documents could also be chosen to be emailed instead of just generated for printing. I know there's no email client in OpenOffice - does it use the locally installed mail client to send? Is there a way to send without a locally installed mail client? It obviously won't help to remove MS Word but still need Outlook/etc.

Obviously I'm going to need to spend some time doing serious prototypes, I was hoping to get some confirmation ahead of time whether it's possible or definitely not possible to do any of these things.

Thanks!

Don
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  • Just a ephemeral detail: LO does send the mails using a python script. On a Linux system, you'll find it at `/usr/lib/libreoffice/program/mailmerge.py`. – tohuwawohu Oct 23 '15 at 14:42
  • I haven't used the mail merge feature myself, but from what I've read on an [OpenOffice forum](https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/index.php) what you're wanting to do is definitely possible with plain text and images; I'm not sure about rich text outside of a macro. To set up the mail merge you'll need to work with Base which is notoriously user unfriendly, and if you need customization with a macro the API is poorly documented. TL;DR Definitely possible and would be similar to your existing process once setup, but you're in for quite a lot of learning time to get the initial setup going. – Lyrl Oct 23 '15 at 19:21

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