[plug] Building a GUI app to generate a wordprocessed letter

[J Michael Gilks]

Sorry I took a while to reply here, but was just checking everything installs 
and works as advertised.
To do this stuff simply, why not use odbc and OpenOffice.org.
For simple database maintenance and forms there is a nice GUI frontend, and 
you could use mail merge to produce the output letter from a stored query.
A good introduction is available from OpenOffice.org
Unfortunately, as usual I have lost the URL I used to download it a couple of 
days ago.
However I do have it as a PDF, 2MB, if you want to reply off list, I can send 
it to you.
Love
Mike.

On Monday 10 Mar 2003 6:10 pm, Derek Fountain wrote:
> This is a bit off topic, but someone on here might have experience of what
> I want to do.
>
> The requirement: user enters customer name, address, and a whole pile of
> application specific information, and the system produces a letter for them
> (confirming an appointment in this case).
>
> I can do the MySQL database. I can do a front end for entering data into
> it. What I don't know how to do is feed the important fields into a decent
> WP so it generates a letter.
>
> Ideally the WP would be OpenOffice, in which my user could produce the
> nicely formatted skeleton of the letter. Is it possible to do a
> merge-on-the-fly sort of operation in OpenOffice Writer, preferably under
> external script control? The underlying format is XML, so it sounds
> possible...