I run two small databases on my LO system from which I print form letters. Many people in Europe frequently need three address lines in addition to the City (Town) line. Also, some users may have an optional field for job designation. When you want to print LABELS or ENVELOPES from your DATABASE which includes blank fields, it is necessary to add Hidden Paragraph or Line suppression codes, the work around involves using EQ "" to stop the "printing" of the empty (blank field) line(s) and this has to be set up before you can print. Can a check box to suppress blank lines when printing from databases be added into the pop-up Mail Merge box? This addition would make LO much more usable to anybody using its integrated facilities and it would also help those users who are not so confident with adding field codes.
This enhancement will make LO perform like most other integrated office packages. Without it, LO is an "Also ran".
You are fooling yourself if you think setting the importance to "high" is going to make other people come running to implement your pet enhancement.
(In reply to comment #2) > You are fooling yourself if you think setting the importance to "high" is going > to make other people come running to implement your pet enhancement. Thank you for your thoughts. Perhaps you can suggest a way of getting the community to give some priority to needed enhancements. You may have seen the recent posts regarding persuading the EC to adopt LO. They will not do so, unless LO creates documents without people having to learn how to insert special codes to do something as simple as not printing blank lines in address labels. Not all users are computer geeks.
Created attachment 45275 [details] Example of drop down box showing requirements This example is shown because some people may not understand the problem underlying this enhancement.
[This is an automated message.] This bug was filed before the changes to Bugzilla on 2011-10-16. Thus it started right out as NEW without ever being explicitly confirmed. The bug is changed to state NEEDINFO for this reason. To move this bug from NEEDINFO back to NEW please check if the bug still persists with the 3.5.0 beta1 or beta2 prereleases. Details on how to test the 3.5.0 beta1 can be found at: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/BugHunting_Session_3.5.0.-1 more detail on this bulk operation: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/RFC-Operation-Spamzilla-tp3607474p3607474.html
This bug remains in the 3.5 beta - such a simple thing should be a simple fix
This is still an issue. In my opinion, it's really necessary for many mail merge operations, as the expected behavior for a field that's left blank (particularly for addresses) is line suppression since there's nothing there.
Adding self to CC if not already on
I'd like to agree with Alan's comments. Suppressing blank lines in a MailMerge is a standard feature in MS Word, and something users encounter frequently. As a programmer it took me an hour to get this working, but that is too much of a learning curve for my mom and kids. This is a potential "show-stopper" in getting folks to migrate from MS Word to LibreOffice.
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/54552
Mike Kaganski committed a patch related to this issue. It has been pushed to "master": http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=db04be037b611e296ef9f2542322c52ed82d7a2b tdf#35798: Hide empty Database fields' paragraphs (+ compat option) It will be available in 6.1.0. The patch should be included in the daily builds available at http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/ in the next 24-48 hours. More information about daily builds can be found at: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Testing_Daily_Builds Affected users are encouraged to test the fix and report feedback.
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/54800
Mike Kaganski committed a patch related to this issue. It has been pushed to "master": http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=2f11ce0670749b9da20dfb29269b176cb09fb01e tdf#35798: use separate paragraphs for Label elements It will be available in 6.1.0. The patch should be included in the daily builds available at http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/ in the next 24-48 hours. More information about daily builds can be found at: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Testing_Daily_Builds Affected users are encouraged to test the fix and report feedback.