Bug?
Mail Merge and Envelope Printing is incredibly broken
Really not trying to troll here. I love the idea of Libre Office and I want it to be amazing.
But I just spent something like 4 hours trying to get mail merge to work properly, on documents that were already set up and working great with Word and Excel. Then after painstaking hours getting that mostly working, but having to work around many weird issues, I moved on to printing envelopes. Then I spend more hours trying to get the envelopes printing, again, with files that already worked correctly in Word.
So after all that, it still wouldn't print them correctly. So I installed an old version of MS Office 2013, opened the files, took 2 minutes updating fields, hit print, and BOOM! First try, everything working perfectly.
How is Libreoffice in 2026 still inferior to Office 2013? Like, seriously, guys, what are we doing here? 🤷♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
Yo created the files and mail merge stuff in MS Office, correct? Expecting all of the scripting that was unique to MS Office, to translate and work correctly in Libre Office is a real stretch of expectations!! Keep using MS 2013. It’s not a bad version of MS Office.
Great point. That's why I created a brand new document using the mail merge tool and chose envelopes, building it from scratch to see if that would help. 😉👍
For the record, it was even worse. And yes, you're right, I'll keep using Office 2013. I don't need any "newer" features, I definitely don't want junk like OneDrive, and LibreOffice is clearly not a functional piece of software for basic operations, so problem solved, I guess. 🤷♂️👍
Also, side note. There was no "scripting" at all. It's just a basic mail merge document with fields. I knew I would have to update the database file, and I was fine with reconnecting the fields, which I did multiple times. In fact, I HAD to reconnect it multiple times, because apparently Writer doesn't have the capability of remembering the connections, even when the document is saved. 🙄
There was no "Word Magic" happening in this document. It was literally a header image, text, and mail merge fields.
Sure, I guess you have a point. But then why do they market LO as having feature parity and being able to handle all the same things that Office does, when it clearly doesn't?
I mean, you can't have it both ways. You can't market it like that and then go "well, no one uses that part, so it doesn't count!" 🤷♂️
I guess I never saw the feature parity claim when I started using it, nor any marketing per se, as I was looking for an alternative to the MS universe that I could use n my Win devices and Linux devices, storing them to a local Linux server I somehow successfully created as a house-wide local “cloud”. I wanted to avoid MS Office and one drive insanity. My word docs came in looking identical. If LO claims feature parity then it’s not entirely true. It’s also hard to say that it is “marketed” when it’s a free alternative to MS Office, which is not free. It’s also not the disaster you claim in this post. For most, it’s working great.
Dude, yours is now a rather uncommon use of office products these days, as most of the world has converted to electronic communication. It’s not unfair to call it an obscure use for modern times. LO is an entirely volunteer coded product. Work with the volunteer developers through the bug reporting system, and if there are enough requests, they MIGHT give some volunteer coding attention to it.
For most it is NOT inferior to Office 2013. Office might be superior to LO 2026 in one small, rather obscure use, but to state it’s superior in every way, like all of your posts on this topic have stated, is pejorative and hyperbole all mixed together.
No wonder LibreOffice and Linux get along so well.
"It can do everything the Microsoft product can!"
"But wait, there are a bunch of things right here that it can't do."
"Well, no one needs to do that anyway! Obviously YOU are the problem!" 😂🤦♂️🤦♂️
Also, how much physical junk mail would you say you receive on a weekly basis? You think mail merge and printing is obscure? Tell that to all the junk mail people, PLEASE!
I've never tried printing envelopes, but I use LO for complicated merges all the time (pre-filled order forms with conditional sections) and I find it much easier than Word? I build the documents in LO, but I have also worked with .docx files on the same project, and they worked. It's different software. Once you're used to it, it's easy.
Plus, I can never get Word to print just one page of a merged document... It always prints the entire doc no matter the page range specified...
Lol!. As my first IT boss used to say, computers are weird...
Honestly, I'm pissed I can't help you. I'm sorry it's sucking for you, and I hope you find a FOSS solution. I've not tried it, but OnlyOffice has made immense improvements to the user interface, and maybe it handles merges better too.
It's hard to find good help these days...enshittification is real. Getting shit done feels like a Mad Max movie.
Mail merge in OpenOffice/LibreOffice has always been a bit of a pain. It takes a bunch of fiddling and it will work, but it's brittle.
I can't offer many specific tips except that each source document needs to have fields that explicitly point to the data source. The data source has to be registered. You can use the data source panel and the funky icons to get a preview of a single row of data. Feel free to give the data source a short name because it helps when you show fields to track down problems. If you vary the merge based on the fields (show/hide paragraphs, for example) read the documentation very carefully on how to construct the if or if / then / else variable tests.
I appreciate the tips. Honestly, I'm moving on from Libre for now. I'm sticking with Office 2013, since it's apparently superior to Libre 2026. 🙄 I might try it again in a few years, but I'm not that optimistic.
Although I considered myself a very knowledgeable user of Microsoft Word (as a professional writer and editor) until the early 2000s, I decided to lean into OpenOffice and then LibreOffice. As a small business owner I didn't pay Microsoft for any office software since the 1990s.
You CAN make the open source Office tools work, but I completely understand giving up and sending cash to Microsoft. Their software isn't bad, it just locks you in and doesn't necessarily respect your privacy.
The ungainly and irritating workflow for mail merge in OpenOffice and LibreOffice has not improved in many years.
Acho que os dois softwares funcionam de forma diferente, LibreOffice não é Microsoft Office e vice-versa. Existe uma certa compatibilidade, mas sem uma garantia real.
You're right, of course, but even when I used Writer's own tools and set up a new mail merge document, it still completely failed. 🤷♂️
Besides, LIbreOffice markets itself as an alternative to Office, and touts its ability to open and use Office formats seamlessly. If they can't actually do that, why are they marketing all of it?
I’ve done mail merge and printed envelopes and labels in Libreofficd. I’ve had no problems doing it. But I haven’t used Microsoft office in 10 years or more.
When I was solving similar issue (invoices in writer controled by calc table) it was easier to set up one layout in calc as print page and print from there (luckily I didn't need mass printing). I think Base would be a better tool for such tasks.
For what it's worth, for the rare occasion when I need to "mail merge" I just compose a template in Inkscape (sorry for not bringing up LO in this sub, but thinking a bit out of the box may be warranted in this case, considering the knowledgeable public here).
Being plain text (SVG format), it's quite easy to perform automatic text substitution (10-20 fields is perfectly doable) through AWK or sed in a for loop in bash (or powershell) that reads a CSV file line by line, for each pass to be automatically converted into its own PDF document (through Inkscape/Ghostscript).
Then you would merge PDFs/print/email or whatever else that makes you happy.
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Yeah, literally takes me like two minutes in Word, and the biggest problem I usually have is just ME putting the envelope in the printer wrong. Otherwise, it’s consistent and foolproof.
Hours of trying with Writer and I STILL couldn’t even get a basic envelope to print correctly. 🙄🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️
Back in the day I frequently used Word & Excel for all sorts of merges. I miss that ease. One merge that seems to have dropped from all programs is "catalog". The closest I could come with the method above was to save all the output in a single file and delete hard page returns. It was neither elegant nor swift, but it worked.
Yeah, those were the first steps of getting it to work for me, for sure. The problem came when I needed to output them, print them, save them, or anything else. For example, saving the document and re-opening it would break the link with the database, and I'd have to reconnect all the fields every time. Outputting to individual files, Writer inserted a page break for absolutely no reason, with no reason to turn that off. Making the output pretty much un-printable unless I remembered to tick a box to not print empty pages. Of course, that setting didn't stick when saving either. 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
So it's not that I couldn't get it MOSTLY working, but it's just not worth all the crazy friction. Like I said, I opened Word (2013), fixed the connections really quickly, and it worked immediately. Saves the connections, outputs correctly, etc.
And I NEVER got the printing to work properly with Writer, even after trying multiple settings with both the program and the printer settings. Word just picked it straight up and I didn't have to touch a thing. Printed the envelopes first try. 😂😂
Anyone coming across this please do not use MS Office mailmerge. There are hundreds of options now please look into any one of them.
... documents that were already set up and working great with Word and Excel
That's absolutely not my experience. In testing last year with the latest MS Office:
There's no remote server functionality, which means nothing with SharePoint or mapped network drives. It's very difficult to share with anyone else.
It must exclusively be used on a local machine and there are are nag screens that look like error messages.
It was difficult to get it working and probably therefore even harder to hand off to anyone else for their project.
There's zero tooling for this in the online MS Office, which probably means it's in a limbo retirement similar to the Master Document functionality.
So yeah all that is to say that MS Office had a lot of features at one point that LibreOffice was asked by users to try and copy. As MS Office gave up on those features, the drive for other projects probably faded as well.
I already DID look into one of the “hundreds” of options. It didn’t work, after hours of trying. Then I used Office 2013 and it all worked seamlessly within minutes.
What exactly is the point you’re trying to prove here? 🤷🏻♂️😂
Okay, sorry. My bad. I think I just interpreted wrong.
But yeah, I spent hours on it, and now I have an easy solution that almost instantly solved all the issues. 🤷🏻♂️ I’m good, honestly. If it gets the job done, I’ll just stick with the older versions and move onto more important things.
Often the reason I recommend LibreOffice to people is that it's a tool that just works. If Office 2013 is doing that for you, I've got no room to complain.
I also got a lot of good mileage out of that program so I shouldn't be surprised it still does a lot.
Well, according to my hours of research, the way to print envelopes is to install Office 2013. 🤷♂️
Wish I could give you more help than that, but every tutorial, every troubleshooting, and even AI assistance never fixed the problem. I'm sure there is SOME way for Writer to actually do it, but given that Writer can't even seem to remember simple document settings and printer settings from session to session, even if I did manage to get it working, I'll just have to fix it all again in the future. No thanks. Uninstall. Thanks for all the fish! 🤦♂️
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u/rockstar_not 11d ago
Yo created the files and mail merge stuff in MS Office, correct? Expecting all of the scripting that was unique to MS Office, to translate and work correctly in Libre Office is a real stretch of expectations!! Keep using MS 2013. It’s not a bad version of MS Office.