On Saturday 29 March 2003 23:42, Pierre Jarillon wrote: > A lot of people who want to migrate to Linux told me that the replacement > of MS-access was the last obstacle.
Others are stuck on MS-Publisher. But OOWriter has started to pick up a lot of Publisher features, like linkable frames. All they really need now (given that embeddable OOImpress objects exist to replace WordArt) is a bit more management on the printing side to allow someone to edit, e.g., a book, card or three-fold brochure as individual pages but have it print out correctly oriented and ordered on fewer, larger sheets. E.g. the threefold brochure would be edited as six tall, skinny pages but printed out on two sides of a single A4 or Letter sheet. That and some wizards so TAFE can teach grown adults important stuff like how to put floral borders on their pages with only three clicks... Back at the databases, I think a completely separate tool is appropriate. The OOo people deliberately restricted what they made the ODBC tools try to do, reasoning that they weren't managing a database, just giving their documents a connection to that data. This is outside Mandrake's scope, but the framework is pretty much all in place within OOo to do a database manager, including a click-n-drool level interface for the illiterati. Another thing I would do - given time - is add `back door' modules to allow OOo to talk to a few common SQL db's (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Firebird, Oracle, SyBase) directly, bypassing the overhead and restrictions of ODBC. Cheers; Leon
