What to do with lots of CSV files

[damian]

Hello all,

I've asked this on a couple of Open Office forums, and not received much 
help. I know it's not an Ubuntu question, but given the excellent 
responses to the "Getting addresses OUT of a spreadsheet" thread, I 
thought I should ask here.

Every week, I receive a CSV file which has a between 3 and 50 people's 
names on it who I should contact. Some of these people have email 
addresses in there, some have snail mail addresses, most have relevant 
dates etc. At the moment, I'm finding these lists unusable and the 
thought of going through them all manually is just too intimidating.

Is there a way to set up Base (or any other part of OpenOffice, or any 
other apps) that could make all of this information more user friendly? 
Could it, for example, just give me a list of all people to contact and 
all of their relevant dates? Which ones are to email and which to write 
to? Maybe even automate the mailing somewhat? And then do the same thing 
with the next file and create a big database of information?

Could I then combine this with my own contacts database (which I've 
never actually set up yet .. still using text files in a folder) to have 
a database of people and to know when my last contact with them was, who 
do I need to chase up? Maybe tag people with X, Y and X options of what 
needs to be done with that contact.

Hope all that makes sense and that someone can help me out. I've got so 
far with an individual file in testing, but doing this with multiple 
files was beyond me and the rest I had no idea at all about.

Maybe I'm trying to be too ambitious and should try to do mail merge 
directly with the CSV files (are letter and email mail merges possible 
from csv files?) and forget the database bit?

Thanks for your time
Damian