Having just spent about eight hours trying to get my first mail merge to work, I thought I’d post the workaround here to save others a lot of head bashing. (There seems to be virtually no acknowledgement of the problem anywhere on the internet).

The Mail Merge wizard in OpenOffice is broken. It is broken in OpenOffice 3.0 (both Windows XP) and Linux and in OpenOffice 2.3.0 (Windows 2000).

The workaround

• Open the document you want to merge in OpenOffice Writer
• Go to View > Data Sources
• Find your database in the left pane of the window that just opened up
• Select your database
• Drag and drop the fields you want into the places where you want them in your document
• Now that you’ve worked around the broken part of the Mail Merge wizard, open the wizard (Tools > Mail Merge Wizard) and go straight to step 8. OpenOffice will perform the mail merge. When the merge has finished just select the appropriate radio button and make your final choices. It works both for letters and email. Hooray!

I didn’t need to personalise any of the individual documents so I’m not entirely sure how it would work. One way (for letters) would be to save your output and personalise manually afterwards. I can’t see any way to make this feature work for email.

I hope this was helpful to you. If you have any comments that could be useful for other people, please add them below.