LibreOffice - another piece of rotting meat

Had to create a mail merge tonight - cost me some grey hair, again. How typical of an open source POS.

Begins with the address block editor dialogue... It ignores user input (leading tabs) and presents the preview as if they are not entered. Its own Left/Top/Right/Bottom buttons insert spaces/CRLF in order to move the field around. Huh? When trying to type in front of the field, entire field is selected and erased. Takes using the above buttons to move it to the right (inserts spaces before) and only then it is possible to position the cursor to the left of the address field. WTF?

Next tab... It inserts the fields inside the text boxes. Well, hmm, Okay... But positions the box absolutely randomly and with no respect to the top/left offset I am specifying. Out of whack.

Next tab... Saving the merged document... You would think that once you saved it to a file, then the new window Writer just opened for it would retain the file name you just saved, as well as the path where it was saved? Wishful thinking! It still thinks it is an Unititled1 in your home directory (I am on Linux).

The merged document is completely butchered. The boxes containing the fields are not where I put them, also something is so screwed that my document that originally fit on 2 pages with quite some slack is now wrapping onto the 3d page. WTF?

Well, after lots of bad blood and screaming at the monitor, I finally figured out the sequence of actions that can provide a quality merged document:

1. Start mail merge wizard. Edit your address block etc. Insert tabs in front of the fields as needed by first using buttons to shift the fields right.
2. Press Edit Document button and move the boxes where you want them to be.
3. Do the merge.
4. Press Customize document.
5. Fix the position of the boxes.
6. Save the merged document.

Now you are really done. Do not skip customization, even if your document looked fine while being merged - the address etc. would be butchered and move up and to the right in the merged document if you skipped that step.

Hoping that helps anyone to avoid going bonkers over non-cooperating POS that LibreOffice has become. I never had such issues while it was Oracle's StarOffice.

Did you think horrors were over? I thought so, but when I finally tried to print the merged document from Linux, the printer wanted to use manual tray. Nothing in LibreOffice printer settings or in CUPS allowed me to choose paper source, so I ended up saving the document to a network drive. Then I went to a Windows machine and opened the document in the same LibreOffice there.

Other than the fact that the text box has shifted again on the very 1st page, everything seemed to be fine, as printer properties on Windows have paper source and it was set to Automatic, which always prints from Tray1. So I sent document to the printer. Some 300 pages later I turned over the printouts and... cursed everything in universe: the To address textbox merged into the document was not there. I had 300 useless letters with no To address on them. LibreOffice managed to spit me into the face after all once again.

I do not give up easily so I exported the document into PDF/A and guess what - the To box exported just fine.

LibreOffice developers, when you read this, know: you are the worst fucking dicks in universe, shit headed monkeys with bat guano for brains. I had enough of your stupidity.

There is more!

After battling LibreOffice and winning (a Pyrrhic victory) I started creating the envelopes. More pain!

Formatted a page as an envelope #10, started merge wizard, went through the same steps and... the merged document was in Letter. Can the assholes at LibreOffice project get anything right???

Sent the enveolpes to the printer under Linux (as it wanted to print from the manual feeder) but this time the printer got stuck on 'Load plain Letter' as if in some kind of twisted torture for the user. Off I go to the Windows workstation...

Opened the envelope merge under Windows and clicked Print. The number of pages was 600. Stopped in horror to check the letter file and database - 300 letters, 300 records. LibreOffice doubles the number of pages in the envelope merge. How do they manage to stuff so many bugs in into-your-face obvious functionality is unfathomable. They quite obviously do not test at all - if it compiles, they release it. Assholes.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 06:54 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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