Open Dental Forum

Has anyone else seen this issue? Merge letters gives an unhandled exception error while switching to word. I didn't have this problem in version 5.5.11.

The only time I've seen it is if the version of Word is wrong.

We over thought the problem on this. Thanks for getting us back on track.

Does the letter Merge feature work with OpenOffice or still with Word only?

Still just with Word.

I have moved to all Open Office b/c if costs an arm and a leg to have MS Office on all my computers. If we could get the merge to work with open office that would be great. Open Office 3 works great. It opens much faster than before (which was it's major drawback)

Drtech,

I've written a small interface between OD and OO Writer. My wife just started using it at her practice, and it seems to work well. It is not extensively tested (installed for 1 wk now). Presently, it saves the file to the images directory and inserts it into the database, from which you can doubleclick it and have it open in OpenOffice. There is also an option to save it to an external file. It looks for templates (any .odt file) ONLY in the images root directory for now. I may change this to look at alternate locations in the future, but a fixed location makes installation a bit easier on multiple machines (just look for the directory location from the database).

It has only been tested on Vista, and not extensively. However, I'd be willing to e-mail you a copy (it's only 100k in size presently). No guarantees that it will work, but I'd be pleased to have somewhat else test drive it briefly to see how well it works outside of our practice, and get suggestions from another user as to what would make it more useful/user friendly.

Note: It doesn't use the letter merge feature. Instead, it links "keywords" to replacement searches. For example, you could set {{PATIENTNAME}} to a database select that would result in "Lname, Fname, MI", or "Mr(s) Lname Fname", or the address, etc. My wife is not very technical, so not having to define fields was much easier for her. She can type the codeword as regular text.

I have not posted this anywhere, but if I clean it up a bit, I may.

Let me know if you are interested, and how to get it to you.

Lennox

sure, I would be happy to test it out....i will send you a private message with my e-mail