Code is Love

So this weekend it was time to get our Holiday Cards out and rather than hand-write 100+ addresses, it seemed to make a lot of sense to mail merge our addresses from a database onto store-bought labels to the tune of 30 per sheet. While in the end this may have been faster to hand-write, if you’re here now, it won’t for you, because as usual, I’m hoping my agony saves you some time.

The labels we happen to have in the office were Avery 8250. If you are using OpenOffice and the 8250s, you probably already know that OpenOffice doesn’t have the 8250 in it’s drop-down in the label-making dialog. Yeah. So after trying to get downloaded template files to do what I wanted, eventually just started tweaking the dimensions of the labels in the OOffice label dialog and got satisfaction this way. But let me rewind…

We happen to have our family address book in a MySQL DB already — but OOffice will accept a number of sources for your data: Evolution, LDAP, Thunderbird, etc.. First I had to figure out how to get the data source into Open Office. While I can’t remember all the gory details, the gist of it is this: installed unixODBC, the odbc stuff for MySQL, edited two files in /etc (see link below), and then was able to connect with username and password from OpenOffice to add the data source. I also had to install openoffice.org-base (OO’s DB package). Then it was time to create some labels.

With OO open, choose File->New->Labels. Here you can choose the data source, format the layout of the fields, etc.. This is where I discovered that not only were the Avery labels I had not in the drop-down, but that Avery pretty much stinks for having no support for OO that I could find on their pretty lousy website. Cheers to the people at Worldlabel.com who had a fair number of OO templates on their site, even though they didn’t have the ones I needed. What I ended up doing was opening the format tab and adjusting the values to what I believed them to be - hint: use a ruler to get started plus the dimensions listed on the packaging. Print on plain paper and hold your output up to a sheet of the real labels in front of a light to test alignment until you get it right.

The Measurements I ended up using (almost perfect - need minor adjustment, but “worked”):
Horizontal Pitch: 2.83″
Vertical Pitch: 1.00″
Width: 2.63″
Height: 0.90″
Left Margin: 0.25″
Top Margin: 0.55″
Columns: 3
Rows: 10

Don’t forget to save these settings — and on the “Options” tab, Make sure “Synchronize Contents” is checked before clicking “New Document”. If in the resulting document you select all (ctrl-a for the keyboard addicts out there), you can then change the font and font size in the first label and then click “syncronize labels” in the dialog window to make the rest follow this format. When you are ready, choosing print should populate the values into the labels from your db — and I to not waste paper or labels, do 1 sheet at a time until you have the alignment right, and then you can print them all at once. Hope this saves someone some time - it sure took a lot of mine to figure out.

References:
Directions I loosely followed to setup ODBC for OOffice/MySQL
Use of MySQL in OOffice 1.0 (PDF)