If you’ve read our previous article, you should know how to create your own envelope which you can send out in the mail or do whatever you want with it. You can customize it to make it your own by adding images and changing the size and font of text which is used on it. This is a fantastic feature included. However, one thing we haven’t talked about just yet is actually for business purposes. What happens if you’re a big business who needs to print many thousands of letters everyday and don’t want to create each letter individually? This could be a long and very boring process, but you’ll be glad to know that the office suite offers a very helpful solution.
Before we start on the printing, we want to talk about using databases with your envelope. You might be unsure of what we mean by this and why you may need it – it does depend on how many you want to send. If you have a database of names and addresses and want to send hundreds of letters at any time, creating a letter for each one could be very time consuming. Luckily, it allows you to connect a database which will automatically print an envelope for each of the users listed. Let’s quickly go through it so you know how to.
Simply go into the suite and open the document you’ve been working on. Go into View –> Data Sources and then select the source which contains all of the different addresses. The tool supports many different formats so no matter what system you’re running, you should find that you can add it easily. Once you’ve added it to Writer, you just need to make sure that the envelope feature uses the addresses in this database rather than the one you’ve edited. This is simple to do too so we’ll go through it for you. You should make sure all of the data you’ve entered is correct in the database, too, because Open Office will just use this and any mistakes could be problematic if you’re printing out a lot and don’t realise it first.
Once you’ve added it, you need to expand the table shown to find all of the data you’ve created. The headers are the most important feature in identifying your data so this is what it is going to use. You need to tell the software what each field in the database actually means in terms of the address, and you can do this by simply dragging the headings into the addresses dialog box in the document you’re working on and then placing them in the appropriate location. You can delete the default address you’ve written before because this won’t be used now. Note that the spaces and line breaks need to be correct when you’re doing it so make sure you leave a space between the first name and last name and leave a line after every part of the address.
In conclusion, it really does make things simple for both individuals who want to create their own letters as well as large-scale businesses who need to communicate with their customers in the form of letters on a very wide scale. All of the features you need are built into the software so that you don’t need any other office programs installed on your computer, which really saves you a lot of time and money especially because our download is free of charge and can be installed within just minutes. If you haven’t yet done so, we highly recommend that you go ahead and put it onto your computer so that you can join everyone else.
Tags: data sources, envelopes, writer