On Sun, Feb 27, 2005 at 07:24:20AM -0500, Haines Brown wrote:
I'm in a position of having to begin using gnumeric to handle the membership of a large organization, with very little experience in gnumeric and none at all in Excel. I've entered much of the data, and know that eventually I'll need to print labels from it. I don't use a word processor, but LaTeX (with emacs under Debian sarge). I'm told that gnumeric-->TeX is the conventional way of doing labels, but I'm uncertain how to go about that. Can anyone point me to a source of information or offer a little guidance?
I prefer to go the same way and did it many times in the past, though I tend to replace gnumeric by a regular database. Anyway, there is nothing wrong with gnumeric to manage data. For making labels with LaTeX/TeX I suggest the labels package. The actual work is the conversion from gnumeric to a text file which can be used with labels. It depends on your knowledge of awk, sed, perl and friends. I usualy save the gnumeric data as csv and convert them to what ever I need, recently using php in most cases. If you use ssconvert and your potential convertion script it can easy be automated.
And a newbie question about the suitability of my organization of data in gnumeric for printing labels. I have put addresses in three columns: a) a column, usually empty, but available for cases where there might be either a c/o or a two-line street address, b) a street address, and c) city-state-zip.
3 columns maybe enough for now, but often you need more columns with smaler chunks of data, like a column for the zip number and city. I gives you more flexibility when filtering or sorting the data. Something you are likely to want sooner or later.
I apologize for a very elementary question, but does this organization of address data seem wise in light of my intention eventually to print labels from it? I'll want to avoid printing an empty line in cases where column (a) above has no data, so that data in cols (b) and (c) follow immediately after the recipient's name.
This can be handled while converting from csv to the labels file or later on in LaTeX (e.g. \ifx\coaddress\ empty ... ), what ever you prefer. Uwe -- MMK GmbH, Universitaetsstr. 11, 58097 Hagen Uwe Steinmann mmk-hagen de Tel: +2331 840446 Fax: +2331 843920
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