E-mailing Documents

Getting Started with OpenOffice 4

Chapter 9: Printing, Exporting, and E-mailing

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• Introduction
• Quick printing
• Controlling printing
• Exporting to PDF
• Exporting to other formats
• E-mailing documents
• Digital signing of documents
• Removing personal data

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E-mailing Documents

Apache OpenOffice provides several ways to quickly and easily send documents as an e-mail attachment in one of three formats: OpenDocument (Apache OpenOffice's default format), Microsoft Office formats, or PDF.

Documents can only be sent from the Apache OpenOffice menu if you have an e-mail program such as Thunderbird installed on your computer. Sending e-mail via a web service accessed through a web browser requires saving the document and attaching it to the e-mail message from the service's software.

To send the current document in OpenDocument format:

1. Choose File → Send → Document as E-mail. OpenOffice opens your default e-mail program. The document is attached.
2. In your e-mail program, enter the recipient, subject, and any text you want to add, then send the e-mail.

File → Send → E-mail as OpenDocument Text (or Spreadsheet or Presentation) has the same effect.

If you choose E-mail as Microsoft [Word,Excel, or PowerPoint], Apache OpenOffice first creates a file in one of those formats and then opens your e-mail program with the file attached. Remember that using a non-native format may cause changes in formatting.

Similarly, if you choose E-mail as PDF, Apache OpenOffice first creates a PDF using your default PDF settings (as when using the Export Directly as PDF toolbar button) and then opens your email program with the .PDF file attached.

E-mailing a Document to Several Recipients

To e-mail a document to several recipients, you can use the features in your e-mail program, or you can use Apache OpenOffice's mail merge facilities to extract e-mail addresses from an address book.

You can use Apache OpenOffice's mail merge to send e-mail in two ways:

• Use the Mail Merge Wizard to create the document and send it. See Chapter 11 (Using Mail Merge) of the Writer Guide for details.
• Create the document in Writer without using the Wizard, then use the Wizard to send it. This method is described here.

To use the Mail Merge Wizard to send a previously-created Writer document:

1. Click Tools → Mail Merge Wizard. On the first page of the wizard, select Use the current document and click  Next .

Figure 233: Select starting document

2. On the second page, select E-mail message and click  Next .

Figure 234: Select document type

3. On the third page, click the  Select Address List  button. Select the required address list (even if only one is shown) and then click  OK . (If the address list you need is not shown here, you can click  Add  to find it and add it to the list.)

Figure 235: Selecting an address list

4. Back on the Select address list page, click  Next . On the Create salutation page, deselect This document should contain a salutation.

Figure 236: Deselecting a salutation

5. In the left-hand list, click 8. Save, print or send. Apache OpenOffice displays a “Creating documents”-message and then displays the Save, print or send page of the Wizard.
6. Select Send merged document as E-Mail. The lower part of the page changes to show e-mail settings choices. (See Figure 237.)
7. Type a subject for your email and click  Send documents . Apache OpenOffice sends the e-mails.

Figure 237: Sending a document as an email message