Collabora with mail-merge feature?

Hi there,
I would like to hook up with a related topic but more from the user side. Currently we are using Only Office on our nextcloud and it is working fine so far. Due to new price model in 2024 we are looking out for a more affordable solution. The only question that I couldn’t figure out is the functionality of mail merge. In Only Office this works fine, but I couldn’t find a mail merge option in Collabora. I investigated on the demo account hosted on nextcloud, but couldn’t find it. I can’t believe that it is not available, so maybe I’m blind. Can anybody help with the question if mail merge exists in Collabora online?
Thanks in advance!

umm dunno why this just popped up in my stream since it’s a bit older now.
So maybe if you still read it it would be nice if you could explain “mail merge”… what’s that. What does it do.
If I’d just take the words and would try to make sense of them I’m afraid there is nothing like that on collabora. At least not now and not that I know of.

This question popped up on a google search for me. I am working on this specific question and have come to a bit of a dead end.

According to all my searching, mail merge functionality should be available in Collabora Office. There exists documentation about it, including about navigating to the “Fields” dialog, where there should be a “Database” tab. On my local LibreOffice, the Database tab exists. When I load the same document, in the same directory, into Collabora Online from Nextcloud, the document (to be merged) opens and the fields are displayed in brackets as they are locally. So the install and document aren’t simply inoperative.

However, the fields appear unconnected and unconnectable to the underlying data source. Opening the “Navigator” sidebar on the right brings up the list of fields which correctly refers to the data source I set up locally pointing to the Calc spreadsheet containing the data. But the connection to that data source doesn’t appear to exist.

Navigating to the Fields dialog produces all the tabs except for the Database tab, which is the one I need. I cannot find any dialog box or menu option to create or link to an existing data source. There is no option within an editor window (for Writer or Calc) to create a new document (including a “Base” database). There is no option within Nextcloud to do so either. Despite the underlying document already being set up to mail merge, when I go to print, no dialog box asks me if I want to print a form letter (which does happen locally).

I hope someone comes back to this question to help sort out how the functionality Collabora documents to exist can actually be used with a Nextcloud connection. So far, I haven’t been able to figure it out.

V-

@VarrinS thanks for explaining that in detail to me. now I got the problem… and know what you wanted to cover.

to me it kinda sounds as if it’s not (correcly?) implemented to nc office/collabora online.
I found this pretty recent topic at communityforum of collabora online

I guess that closes this topic on our forum… since there’s nothing we can do about it right now.

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