Writing and publishing books on Kindle

Thanks to the digital book revolution, it is quite easy to publish your work yourself without convincing a publisher to publish them for you or pay hefty fees to have them publish. This post on Linux Journal suggests using an OpenOffice template (not free) to write your work that is perfectly compatible with the Kindle.

I searched up how to do so for LaTeX, and found this post with a LaTeX template.

Quite nice and easy to self-publish with a reputable publisher and make money. Most of my work will probably be freely available though.

Generate multiple forms and filling them with data from a spreadsheet or database

Suppose I have a form (template) that I want to fill in, and I have a database or spreadsheet that has all the data. I would like to generate forms that are filled-out using records from a data source. I want to do this automatically of course.

After much googling, I FINALLY found out that the correct terminology for doing something like this is “mail merge” (thanks to this post). I didn’t know the vocabulary so I didn’t run into much at first (I thought I had to do VBA coding, which is nuts since i think this is something that most people do often).

After getting the terminology, mail merge, I realize most office suite has this feature. Here is a walkthrough for MS Office, and here is a walkthrough for Neooffice. Too bad google docs doesn’t have this feature (yet?).

Now life should be a lot easier now! I can have soft copies or i can print them out.
http://blog.nguyenvq.com/blog/tag/open-office/
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