Mail merge without MS Office

[GanChan]

I've received a spreadsheet and a letter pre-formatted with the necessary fields for a mail-merge with the spreadsheet, but I don't own MS Office. I do have NeoOffice, LibreOffice and iWork. Can I simply save the MS docs into .odt or Pages format and then do the mail merge according to that application's normal process, or will I lose something in the translation?

 

[r0k]

I've received a spreadsheet and a letter pre-formatted with the necessary fields for a mail-merge with the spreadsheet, but I don't own MS Office. I do have NeoOffice, LibreOffice and iWork. Can I simply save the MS docs into .odt or Pages format and then do the mail merge according to that application's normal process, or will I lose something in the translation?

You should be able to open them in LibreOffice or iWork (Pages/Numbers). Some formatting might get lost but it should be easy enough to go in and correct it. It's been so long since I did mail merge, I think the last time I did it was in Pages using a Numbers file for addresses. I was pretty happy with how easy it was to do.