Open Office *ptui*
Nov. 10th, 2012 10:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamsharkIn case anyone was wondering, Open Office's database is NOT compatible with Microsoft Access. It's also an unstable POS that crashes approximately twice per hour.
I was able to import the data files from my Access-based programming database, and it even preserved the table relationships. But the hard work of creating queries, forms and reports has to be done all over again from scratch. The interface is similar to Access in look and feel, but with many many differences, and a noticeably diminished feature set. It is very slow going.
Here's what I've learned so far:
1) Report generation has serious limitations. To generate anything remotely useful you have to download the Oracle Report Writer extension, and even that is pretty primitive. For instance, you can't generate reports from pre-defined queries.
2) When you add a field to a form, a label field is auto-generated and grouped into a single object with the data field. Until you ungroup them you can't edit the properties of either one. This is not intuitively obvious.
3) To add text to a form you have to create an empty label field, select it, open the properties popup, and then type the text you want to display into the "Label" field of the properties sheet. (In Access you can just type directly into the label field on the form)
4) To get text to wrap inside a text field you do NOT select one of the "wrap" options from the format menu. Instead, you open the field's property sheet and set Text Type to "multi-line." You don't want to know how long it took me to figure that out.
I was able to import the data files from my Access-based programming database, and it even preserved the table relationships. But the hard work of creating queries, forms and reports has to be done all over again from scratch. The interface is similar to Access in look and feel, but with many many differences, and a noticeably diminished feature set. It is very slow going.
Here's what I've learned so far:
1) Report generation has serious limitations. To generate anything remotely useful you have to download the Oracle Report Writer extension, and even that is pretty primitive. For instance, you can't generate reports from pre-defined queries.
2) When you add a field to a form, a label field is auto-generated and grouped into a single object with the data field. Until you ungroup them you can't edit the properties of either one. This is not intuitively obvious.
3) To add text to a form you have to create an empty label field, select it, open the properties popup, and then type the text you want to display into the "Label" field of the properties sheet. (In Access you can just type directly into the label field on the form)
4) To get text to wrap inside a text field you do NOT select one of the "wrap" options from the format menu. Instead, you open the field's property sheet and set Text Type to "multi-line." You don't want to know how long it took me to figure that out.
