Donor Manager Software

Hello John, thanks for all your hard work on an excellent product.
Today I thought I had at last made my final break with Msoft - the only thing holding me back has been our supporter database.
I installed DM (latest stable release version) on my Linux box (Karmic) under Wine and all went without any hitches or errors whatsoever. Then I exported my ms access data to an xl spreadsheet and imported it straight to DM without any errors at all. Great I thought - "I've done it, I've made the break Hallelujah!

Then I came unstuck. I went to print envelopes. Do you see where I'm going with this? In Linux we don't have ms office and therefore don't have ms word. When I hit the "send envelopes to word for printing" button I get an error of course - no word! Is there any way to make it compatible with OpenOffice?

TIA,
Karl

Hi,

I also use Linux and DM and ran into the same issue. My solution was to manually browse to the template file and make changes by opening it up in Openoffice.

The file you are looking for is found in /home/<your_username_goes_here>/.wine/drive_c/donor5/

It should be called "envelope.doc"

Hope this helps!

Oops!

I realized as soon as I posted that I didn't answer your question at all. You probably already knew what I mentioned.

My solution is to just create an .xls file and export and do a mail merge in OOo Writer. Not perfect, but workable. (Which very well could be the motto for Linux in my opinion!)

Hope this works!

Printing envelopes requires a bit of fiddling but it can be done.
1. From donor manager print envelopes as you would under windows - you will get a popup complaining that word can't be found - just click OK, it doesn't matter.
2. In your /home/user/.wine/drive_c/donor5 folder you will see a file envelopedata.xls has been created.
3. In the same folder there should also be a file envelope.doc - open that in OOo Writer, modify as necessary and save as on .odt file
4. In that document set the envelopedata.xls as the data source and do a mail merge
5. Save and/or print the resultant document.

Hope this helps someone. I haven't been as detailed as I could but giving general steps to show it is possible.

Thanks for this information. It's helpful, and as I'm a Linux noob, the explanation is clear.