Address book

[janestarz]

I've been looking into Open Source address books lately. It's not as simple as it sounds. I'm even considering just making my own database for it.

First I stumbled into something called Address Book, but it's an online resource and has recently been taken down. I wouldn't want to post private data about anyone online and that is the main reason I hardly store e-mail addresses even on Gmail, Yahoo Mail or Hotmail.

I then found a Dutch pdf explaining exactly how to create an address database by using the Mail Merge Wizard from OpenOffice. Though it looks handy, I'm stumbling into a typically Dutch situation.
The Mail Merge Wizard uses standard fields, which can be linked to fields from a comma-separated-values file (easily adjustable in any spreadsheet program). No problem there!

However, it's so Dutch to have names like "Jan van den Berg". In English, the "van den" will probably be merged into one huge name: Vandenberg. In Dutch, they'll be called 'inbetweens' (tussenvoegsels). And when sorting by last name, above example Jan will be filed with B, not with V (since "van" is an inbetween, and not part of the last name).

So I have a challenge. I can solve it several ways:

1. Adhere to English rules, have the Van den Berg people sorted under V and not worry about it (data entry would involve the complete last name to be "Van den Berg").
   
2. Adhere to English rules but sort the .csv file by first name in stead of last name, sorting Jan van den Berg with J. This is actually a semi-acceptable solution as other stuff has been sorted this way before.
   
3. Make my own database, with my own queries and forms. This includes me learning the rules to Access on Skillport and applying my newfound knowledge in OpenOffice Base. It's never a waste to learn Access skills and I have some basis from my college time to build up from.
   
4. Find out whether the Dutch distro of OpenOffice has a different way to handle the Mail Merge Wizard, with the correct fields for Dutch names (and sorting)
   
5. Learn to program and make my own database and Mail Merge Wizard from scratch.
   
6. ??? Profit! (I mean: your intelligent solution here)

I don't have an overabundance of time at the moment, so I'm stuck figuring things out in the ten minutes between dinner and sports and the fifteen minutes of waiting while my queries run, but that's fine.

Should anyone have any interesting solutions for me, I'd love to hear them!

Comments

[erwinl.livejournal.com]

Are we the only country (with perhaps Belgium) to have these inbetweens?
The german 'von' used to be Prussian royalty and was sort of discontinued after the Great War (as far as I remember correctly).

But I'm really terrible with databases. I can use them, but absolutely not create them, so I can't help you there.

[nokey.livejournal.com]

We can probably add another column to store all the inbetweens.

[janestarz.livejournal.com]

Yes, we could. But then Open Office freaks out over the fields. You can't add an extra field to the Mail Merge Wizard, so in essence this means that the CSV file will be correct (that's the easy part, after all) but then we couldn't use it to print envelopes. Or some such.