I need an application that can print addresses from a contact information database into small sticky address labels (for example 4x8 labels per A4 sheet). We moved away from an old Lotus Organizer ('95 version I guess) on Windows, and it did it's job quite ok. I'm looking similar application for Linux, and haven't yet found any. The Organizer actually works 90% ok using WIne, but it can't print. Besides that, I don't want to RELY on programs that run only through Wine.

Our contact information (Name, address, phonenumber, email etc.) is kept temporarily in a Gnumeric spreadsheet, which is - for us - good enough for most "database" purposes. The problem is that Gnumeric can't print labels. We have to print hundreds of labels couple of times in a year, so label printing is essential.

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So is there a simple Contact information database program that can easily print onto labels? I would not wan't to run a full SQL database just to be able to print address labels couple of times in a year. I've tried several Addressbook programs in vain. OpenOffice 1.1.3 seems to be able to print labels from a database, but from which kind of a database?

Here's MY solution to this. OpenOffice has extensive label printing features, and understands the "Avery" label numbers. It also is very easily connected to MySQL, internally. I exported my data in csv format, then scripted it into MySQL. Now, just a touch of the F4 key, puts the addresses at the top of the screen, and from there, OO can do merging, and the labels "just work". All this was over a year ago, so I don't remember much about details, but I DO recall I had to implement a "key" field before anything would sort.

I wrote this little script to convert rows of data into an address label format:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

open (ADDRESS,"address.csv");
open (OUT, ">ml10-out");

while (<ADDRESS>) {
chomp;
($name,$address,$city,$state,$zip)=split(/,/);
print OUT "$name\n$address\n$city,$state,$zip\n";
}

Now you have a text file with data arranged in a

Name
Address
City, State, Zip

format.

You can import this into a spreadsheet. Then cut it into parts and rearrange it so it fills the number of columns available on your label stock. Then play with the column widths and row heights to get everything to line up, and print your labels.

It takes a few minutes, but if sure beats typing all those names and addresses into a new spreadsheet.

I finally managed to make address label printing to work, and though that I'd give here a short report on my method.

First I installed OpenOffice 2.0.1. I moved my addressbook from a Gnumeric spreadsheet via CSV to the OpenOffice Dbase. I had a bunch of problems with this, partly caused by encodings (UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1/15), partly by Gnumeric creating disfunctional CSV's. But when I had manually fixed the CSV file and saved it in ISO encoding, I managed to import it into DBase.

Then I realized that Dbase can use CSV's as a source, but cannot modify them. So I had to import the CSV into OpenOffice Calc and save it into .dbf file (OpenOffice Dbase file). Then I could use this file as a read/write database source.

After having the database working, I created a Query that would only list entries that really had an address. At least the Dbase "Query wizard" was quite limited, so I could not, for example, check whether an entry (e.g. "City", "Address"...) was present. Instead, I had create a seperate entry from the "Postal code", which is the only numeric value in the address, at least here in Finland. Then I could do a query which checked whether the value in "Postal Code" was above 0 (present). Then I used this query as a label source when printing labels.

With the help of OpenOffice's internal help I finally managed to create working label configuration. If I had had some "Avery" labels it would have been easier. But I only had real A4 label papers which is not the same as "Avery A4" for some reason. So I tried various configurations, and found out that "Herma A4" was almost the same size as a real A4. So by tweaking the "Herma A4" a bit I managed to print professional labels.

All this took me about 10 hours - I had no previous experience of databases. I hope this will help someone else using Linux and wanting to print address labels.

In my opinion, this solution is far too heavyweight for most purposes. The OpenOffice DBase seemed a bit flakey, and it crashed quite many times - mostly at the importing part. It should not be too difficult to create similar label printing functionality to an ordinary addressbook program - for some reason I have not yet tumbled upon one.