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If you ever used the mail merge wizard with a Calc data source, then you know how it worked in the past: you’ve got 3 files: the .odt mail template, the .ods data source and a .odb data source definition that defines how to access the .ods.
The target of this LHM-funded project was to get rid of the .odb file and just embed it into the .odt mail template. Why?
Here is the problem description from a user’s point of view: "When a mail merge document is being saved a separate database file is being automatically created. It links the Writer file to the spreadsheet (ODS, XLS, XLSX etc.) as data source. This additional 2kB ODB file confuses users, they might delete it without knowing to break the connection to the data source." An additional problem is that because the non-embedded data source definition is part of the user profile, you can’t just move the three files to an other machine, as .odb registration will be missing there.
If you are interested how this looks like, here is a demo (click on the image to see the video):
That’s it for now — as usual the commits are in master, so you can try this right now with a 5.1 daily build. :-)