[TriLUG] Christmas card automation

[T. Bryan]

On Sunday 10 December 2006 13:07, Jim Tuttle wrote:

> I've been spending this weekend doing the Christmas card thing and
> thought "There must be a better way!"  I thought perhaps using Open
> Office and whatever mail merge features it has would be a possibility.

My dad used to do this under Lotus Smart Suite in Windows.  Mail merge is good 
for getting mail labels and the template of the letter for everyone.  You can 
probably even generate all of the letters and add some personalized stuff to 
each one before printing it.

I just looked at OpenOffice, and it seems to have standard mail merge stuff 
with data sources from address books, databases, text files, and 
spreadsheets.  If you're a big fan of KDE, you could also try using their 
address book and word processor since they probably have tighter/quicker 
integration.  Of course, I'm not sure whether it can handle labels.

> How do you all deal with this?

Personally, I'm in the "no cards" crowd, but I'm interested in this kind of 
thing since it's the type of task that normal (non-programmer) users of open 
source software might be interested in.  I'd like to have a better answer for 
them than "I don't know.  I guess you could write a Perl script."

---Tom