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Re: [LUG] OpenOffice.org Base Tutorials?

 

Grant Sewell wrote:
> Tom Potts wrote:
>>
>> Have to agree there from my experience. Has anyone seen a Base or Kexi 
>> tutorial that successfully takes you through two joined tables with a ddl?
>> Even getting to that stage might be useful for some RAD stuff.
>> I must confess I almost miss Access - though like many MS things it always 
>> ends up as a main part of the bottleneck after a while.

Access was hideous. The useful thing was the third party query design
tool they bought in. I did some JetDB programming, but once you'd used
VB Pro, going back to Access was just too hideous to contemplate.

Looks like they continue to ship it with just the tools to connect to
Microsoft databases, and one of our customers who'd connected to
Postgres with older versions of access was struggling with Vista, seems
the net is full of people who can't do the equivalent of "apt-get
install odbc-postgresql" (although I note that Debian gets a bit keen
with dependencies).

> I'm about to start the tutorial that came in the Linux-Format-based 
> OpenOffice "book" that was in WHSmiths a while ago.

Let us know how it goes. It seems to be easier to use Base than Access,
but they have gone down the Access clone route a long way. I think the
main problem with both, is that to use them effectively you have to
understand the SQL relational database way. At which point you have a
whole host of tools you could use to do the same task. The main
advantage in that sense of Access was it, or its components were
probably already installed everywhere, which generally isn't a difficult
issue with GNU/Linux desktops.

Perhaps we should organise some training so that everyone in the GLUG
who wants to knows databases to the point where they can create their
own desktop database application?

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