On Fri, 14 Oct 2005 15:22:20 -0400 in Ted Byers wrote:

I agree that databases tend to work much better than spread sheets.
However, databases cannot be maintained for weeks on end with a printout
and a pencil or pen :-).
Moving to a database has been hindered by laziness and cheapness.
Open Office currently lacks something equivalent to access and rolling
my own database is going to lead to a tangent on generating tables for
printout and attempt #3 at writing a GUI app.

Well, you coud try MySQL. It is free, and if you get the administration app
available for it, creating new tables is as easy as it is in MS Access. I
have worked with both. MySQL is, though, a more serious, production quality
DB and so, for ease of entering data, and then viewing it, you'd need to
create a GUI App. You say you've tried to create a GUI App a couple times.
May I ask using what, and in what programming language? It is quite easy,
now, to create GUI applications using products like NetBeans (free from
www.netbeans.org) and Suns Java SDK (free from Sun). It is hard to beat
free. If you want to give it a try, using NetBeans and Java, and you get
stuck, just ask and I'll try to help you. But since I try to earn a living
doing this, I can't guarantee an instantaneous response. A terrific
resource for you are those Usenet newsgroups focussed on computer
programming, but again patience is sometimes required.

I'm familiar with mysql (In fact it has become a somewhat important
part of my current job). I tend to keep away from Java. With the
appropriate libraries seems to be a decent, if slow, tool for providing
user interfaces. It seems to be wholly inadequate for data processing.
I'm old school C/sed/awk/perl/DB2 SQL including implementing state machine
parsers in perl and awk.

The first attempt, which was successful, was a problem tracking
application done in REXX with one of the GUI toolkits for REXX
in the early 90s (DB2 was the backend for the data).
The second attempt was a connect four game in Visual Age Small Talk.
I'm afraid that my viewpoint on object oriented programming was
indelibly tainted by someone more focused on the method than
the result.
It doesn't help that I'm one of those folks that doesn't see an issue
with inflicting an obscure positional grammar onto end users :-).

The fact is that spreadsheets are modelling tools, wholly inappropriate for
trying to maintain a database. But it is tempting to abuse them in this way
because it is so easy to use them to manage data. Using a spreadsheet to
manage data, though, is rather like using a hammer to drive a screw. You
can do it, but doing so is usually harder, and always less efficient, than
using the right tool, and it will eventually lead to significant problems.

In this case a spread sheet is a substitute for graph paper that is
less likely to be water damaged :-).
(Except it still gets water damaged because I work from printouts.)

I'd wager that Open Office doesn't have something like MS Access largely
because there are several open source DB products including, but not limited
to, MySQL and postgres.

When I say "Access" I really mean something like QMF and that
horrid GUI forms tool for DB2/2 from a decade past.
From what I've seen of Access is that it provides a more up to date
implementation of such functionality. However I'm not entirely
certain as it's almost always interfacing to the most braindead
database schema I've ever seen :-).


--
Chris Dukes
Suspicion breeds confidence -- Brazil