I found an interesting article on Newsforge that talks about getting data from a MySQL database to OpenOffice applications. I think I still have an older version of OO.o installed because I don't remember seeing the "Base" application that the technique relies on.

Base sounds like it's worth upgrading to OpenOffice 2. It has it's own database engine but can access MySQL and a bunch of other formats. I think it'd be interesting to experiment with, but moreover I could get a whole lot more out of MySQL with a good reporting tool.