In this episode we take a look at how to perform a mail merge in LibreOffice. A mail merge involves using a text document as a template, and “merging” it with records maintained in a database. Usually this is done when personalizing mass mailings so that the recipient’s name and address appear in the document. To make the exercise a little more interested, in this episode we use the mail merge capabilities of LibreOffice, and create a game of “Madlibs”.

It becomes increasingly important to efficiently select the cells you are working with, in an OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet, as your spreadsheet gets bigger and bigger. Those of you who have worked with files that are thousands of rows long know what I mean. Learning a few simple keyboard shortcuts, will make your productivity increase tremendously! In this episode, we cover a few of the most useful shortcuts for selecting cells in an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet. Once you have the cells you want selected, you can use your selection to apply formatting to make your spreadsheet look nice, or use the values of your selection in calculating formulas.

Often when creating documents you will want to repeat a piece of text on each page you print out. Sometimes this means printing the title of the document on the top of each page, including the date a document was created on the bottom of each page, or printing the page number on each page individually so that they do not get accidentally placed out of order. OpenOffice.org makes creating such headers or footers a breeze. With a few simple clicks you will be able to include titles, dates, page numbers, or any other information in the headers or footers of all your documents.

This episode focuses on introducing the basic concepts of using formulas in OpenOffice.org’s Spreadsheet program, including using functions to add groups of numbers, calculate their average, and other basic mathematical operations.