Skip to main content

Semi-Automated Mail Merge in OpenOffice

I released a new version of my MailMerger application (http://rubyforge.org/projects/mailmergehelper/) . The application now uses java and ruby to automate the collection and processing of csv data to be merged. It uses a java class that can transform csv to ods (OpenOffice Calc document) and viceversa and html to ods. The Writer mail merge template must use a datasource that links to an ods spreadsheet. It works with OpenOffice 2.3. The program has helped me alot at work, where we use it to automatically take the html data produced by RenWeb's create-a-report and convert it to ods so that OO Writer can use it for mail merge. The program also allows for custom ruby scripts to process the data before is sent to Writer. I also found that the best way of doing labels in OpenOffice is to download the Microsoft Word templates from the Avery website and then convert them into odt.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Powershell script for converting JPG to TIFF

The following Powershell script will convert a batch of JPEG files to TIFF format: #This Code is released under MIT license [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Drawing") $files_folder = 'C:\path-where-your-jpg-files-are\' $pdfs = get-childitem $files_folder -recurse | where {$_.Extension -match "jpg"} foreach($pdf in $pdfs) { $picture = [System.Drawing.Bitmap]::FromFile( $pdf.FullName ) $tiff = $pdf.FullName.replace('.PDF','').replace('.pdf','').replace('.jpg','').replace('.JPG','') + '.tiff' $picture.Save($tiff) }
Post a Comment
Read more

Power Automate: SFTP action "Test connection failed"

When I added an SFTP create file action to my Power Automate flow ( https://flow.microsoft.com ) , I got the following error in the action step, within the designer: "Test connection failed" To troubleshoot the Power Automate connection, I had to: go the Power Automate portal then "Data"->"Connections"  the sftp connection was there, I clicked on the ellipsis, and entered the connection info It turns out, that screen provides more details about the connection error. In my case, it was complaining that "SSH host key finger-print xxx format is not supported. It must be in 'MD5' format". I had provided the sha fingerprint that WinScp shows. Instead, I needed to use the MD5 version of the fingerprint. To get that, I had to run in command line (I was in a folder that had openssh in it): ssh -o FingerprintHash=md5 mysftpsite.com To get the fingerprint in MD5 format. I took the string (without the "MD5:" part of the string) and put
Post a Comment
Read more

Alert if file missing using Powershell

The following Powershell script can be used to send an email alert when a file is missing from a folder or it is the same file from a previous check: $path_mask = "yourfile_*.txt" $previous_file_store = "lastfileread.txt" $script_name = "File Check" ###### Functions ########## Function EMailLog($subject, $message) {    $emailTo = "juanito@yourserver.com"    $emailFrom = "alert@yourserver.com"    $smtpserver="smtp.yourserver.com"       $smtp=new-object Net.Mail.SmtpClient($smtpServer)    $smtp.Send($emailFrom, $emailTo, $subject, $message) } Try {    #get files that match the mask    $curr_file = dir $path_mask |  select name    if ($curr_file.count -gt 0)    {        #file found        #check if the file is different from the previous file read        $previous_file = Get-Content $previous_file_store        $curr_file_name = $curr_file.Item(0).Name        if ($
Post a Comment
Read more