“Last week we learned how to make pages of labels, business
cards, and form letters using OpenOffice Writer and Base. The steps
for setting up any mail-merge document in OpenOffice are easy; the
one potentially gnarly bit is creating your contacts database in
the first place. Your contacts list must be in Base, which is a bit
of a pain. But the good news is Base can import data from most
other databases, spreadsheets, text-delimited files, and email
address books. Figure 1 shows the import screen. Yours may have
some different options, depending on your Linux distribution.“Base can connect directly to most relational databases, such as
MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Adabas D, or any database that supports
the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) or Java database connectivity
(JDBC) drivers…”