Hello,

Just wanted to share the experience that the presence of any periods in the
title row of a spreadsheet messes up the mail merge fields when a database
source is created from the said spreadsheet. For example, "P.C." title of a
column creates empty fields in mail merge ("<>" is shown) but changing it to
"Postal Code" fixes it. It appears that since periods are used as separators in
the address book fields, the periods in the title row may be messing things up.

Further, the problem manifests itself in weird ways if I drag and drop a field
from a database source into the first label (from the database sources, obtained
by pressing F4). By dragging fields this way at least does not give the empty
fields <>. This happened while I was printing labels. Initially, all the labels
turned out to be the same. I then tried to delete the fields from the first
label so that only the fields with no periods remained and synchronized other
labels, and then added each field from the address source (got by pressing F4)
by clicking on the field and dragging and dropping it. As long as I included
fields with no periods, everything worked, but as soon as I included fields with
periods, the output data seemed to have been shifted by one cell (the first cell
of the columns with headings with period was missing).

This was on OOo 2.4 on Windows as well on Debian Sid.

thanks,
->HS