Re: [Sheflug] OpenOffice 2.0

[Alex Hudson <home [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi James,

On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 20:36 +0100, James Wallbank wrote:
> David said...
>  > I'm not sure there are too many advantages to using it over 1.x
>  > though.
> 
> I understand that the key feature of OOo 2.0 which 1.x doesn't have is 
> the "OObase" application - which is a database frontend along the lines 
> of Micr***ft Access. (Ooops, nearly swore!)
> 
> I'm absolutely itching to try this out - yes, I know there are all sorts 
> of clever ways to set up databases with Linux, using PHP, MySQL and so 
> on, but not ways that regular, "we don't touch the commmand line" office 
> staff can handle. I really hope that OObase does the job.

Actually, OOBase looks pretty good. If you're using Ubuntu, it's
actually part of the openoffice.org2-core package (it's not packaged
separately like the other apps, for undiscernable reasons).

OOBase has caught a lot of flak for being written in Java. Now, the
version I have doesn't appear to call Java at all so I presume that it
has been compiled with gcj or something. But, it does *feel* like a Java
app in many ways unfortunately.

However, in operation it is very much access like. You have the table
designer and query designer that was in OOo1.1 (which was accessed with
the magic F7 key, IIRC - most people don't realise that OOo can actually
do much of this...!), but there is extra stuff. It's more SQL-oriented,
and you do get forms and all that kind of thing.

I haven't used it in anger myself yet, but it's looking reasonably
competent. I was able to setup a table, enter some data and design a
query to retrieve data in two minutes before sending this e-mail: it
works as you would expect it to if you've ever used Access in the past. 

Possibly the weak aspect will continue to be the forms and scripting
though: I'm not sure that this is going to be able to support actual
applications in the way that Access can, but I guess we'll see. Being
able to have an open database format would be way-cool.

Cheers,

Alex.

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