Busy monday

First day at the office after a week on vacation. And a busy day too.

My company has decided to introduce common layout on our letter stationaries. Huh ?

So my job was to consolidate all the individual letter templates, contract templates etc. to a common company layout. Fantastic decision. The rest of the world did this in the late 80's I think.

OK now, we are using Lotus Notes in several versions and OpenOffice.org. We have decided to use the Swing Integrator from Swing Software (http://swingsoftware.com) and I can only recommend this solution.

Well, I started out making the blank letter template and decided to do some house keeping also, so I cleared all the data fields that was transfered, but not in use. Fascinating how little effort it takes to speed up a computer system. I also decided to improve the layout by removing (hiding) the field labels in case the field doesn't receive any data.

After that i was asked to look into the mail merge template to see if I could figure out what was wrong with it. I found out, that the data exchange wasn't very accurate, because about half the mapped data fields actually missed the target. No wonder why it didn't work. Ok, now it actually works, but I still have an error message on the screen, but I don't have the right (skills) to debug the thing.

I actually made it work, and tomorrow I'll try to run a massive test and see if its possible to mail merge several hundred (or 1,000) letters.

Se how easy it is to set up the field mapping (from Notes field to OpenOffice.org field):