How do I play Mad Libs with an Excel spreadsheet and Word doc?

September 8, 2014 6:49 AM

I have a spreadsheet that contains information I want to use to fill out a form, Mad Libs style. Essentially, I'd take each row of the spreadsheet and use the cells to populate a text document. It's not actually in Excel/Word - it's in Libreoffice, if that changes anything. I also need room for conditional if-then statements, because some text may require additional accompanying notes. I tried generating a pdf in Nandeck (card game generation software) but that doesn't work well for formatting text relative to other text, so I'm looking for a better solution.
posted by LSK to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

You want a mail merge, which is available in LibreOffice in a manner similar to Word. As far as I know, you'll have to work out the if/then statements in the spreadsheet, but I use this extensively for cutting and pasting comments and letters with no problems.
posted by zachxman at 7:17 AM on September 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Unfortunately, LibreOffice's mail merge function is geared towards letter-writing and doesn't appear to have functionality for more involved projects. Essentially I want to transform data into individual profiles - this isn't the same topic as what I'm doing, but imagine a book with a page for every country and country-specific stats like population, area, etc.
posted by LSK at 8:04 AM on September 8, 2014