alt Hacker NewsI send a fair amount of physical mailings. This requires me to do a mail merge from a spreadsheet to adhesive labels. I will buy whatever brand of inkjet paper filled with adhesive labels is the cheapest at that given time. The manufacturer gives a template for the labels. Every year or so I will check the feasibility of switching to LibreOffice or OnlyOffice or whatever the thing people say is the open source future of office software is. I will try to do this same exact action, which every office in the world likely does a significant number of times per year. Every year, once I figure out how to mail merge (sometimes, a drastically different process in the interface, whereas Microsoft has kept this relatively intuitive throughout the ages) I end up with misaligned labels on a sheet of ruined label paper, despite the alleged format compatibility of the open source alternatives.
I hate Microsoft. I hate having to use Windows. But nobody in the free software community has ever made this not a nightmare. I suppose I might take a picture of the fucked up product and ask Claude if it can fix my fucking labels. That might actually work.
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You could try changing your process, use something like getgrist.com.
> despite the alleged format compatibility
that never existed. While Microsoft has published a specification of their file formats, the never described how to render them. So a clone cannot make it look like Microsoft Office.
Blame it on Microsoft. Stop the vendor lockin and leave Microsoft today
At what point does implementing it yourself become a savings?
Maybe there should be an app just for doing mail-merge. That should be fairly simple I assume?
Create a bounty, I'm in for at least a couple hundred $ in tokens to solve this, assuming MIT or copyleft license is used to avoid future commercial capture.
I hate to say this butt I wonder if you could just generate a CSV (I use python for this sort of thing) and send to a vendor to just make the labels for you? (Admittedly this is a North American view point) but it might actually be less effort (time for you) and cheaper.
Have you tried [0]? It can source values from CSV file and after configuring a label and sheet template you should be able to use it to print filled labels.
Can be used it with a thermal label printer and with generic label sheets if you are willing to hand tweak templates.
[0] https://glabels.org/