This is a bit off topic, but someone on here might have experience of what I want to do. The requirement: user enters customer name, address, and a whole pile of application specific information, and the system produces a letter for them (confirming an appointment in this case). I can do the MySQL database. I can do a front end for entering data into it. What I don't know how to do is feed the important fields into a decent WP so it generates a letter. Ideally the WP would be OpenOffice, in which my user could produce the nicely formatted skeleton of the letter. Is it possible to do a merge-on-the-fly sort of operation in OpenOffice Writer? The underlying format is XML, so it sounds possible... -- "...our desktop is falling behind stability-wise and feature wise to KDE ...when I went to Mexico in December to the facility where we launched gnome, they had all switched to KDE3." - Miguel de Icaza, March 2003