Barbara Duprey wrote:
... seems to be built around confining all edits to a single field in
a single record at any given time. No Find and Replace, for instance,
which would have been a great help in dealing with those leading and
trailing blanks. ......
Well, leaving with what GUI features are lacking in Base - there is
still SQL..
Say you have a table named t1 and a column c1 the column contains
records with erroneous leading or trailing spaces, now you want to clean
that up.
Open the SQL window. Tools > SQL
Enter this SQL command:
UPDATE "t1" SET "c1" = TRIM( "c1 )
Now, perhaps some of the records contain values in c1 that include the
character "-", but it should have been the character "_".
This command will do the trick.
UPDATE "t1" SET "c1" = REPLACE( "c1", "-", "_" )
Anyway - those are just a couple of examples - but when you combine the
capabilities inherent in SQL and the scripting capabilities in OOo (
Basic, JavaScript, Python, REXX ( addon required - and I am guessing you
might like that one ) and Java ) - well, you can get a lot done. The
fact that OOo has scripting capabilities in and of itself is not that
impressive - but the depth of the OOo API that is exposed is. The big
draw back to this scripting power is, however, that it is the low level
API - you can do a lot, but there is a lot to get your head around
before you can really become efficient.
One of the major problems with Base at the moment, IMO, is lack of
decent documentation. There is progress being made on that front - the
latest copy of the OOo2 User Guide for instance just got an update to
the section on Base. The getting started guide also. You can find both
from the OOo main web site, under the support page.
From the scripting side I would recommend that you get a copy
"StarOffice 8 Basic Programmers Guide" from the SUN web site.
There are also a couple of good documents, more of a cookbook style,
available at http://www.pitonyak.org
Then there is the mother load for the API - the OOo Developers Guide. (
A svelte 1100+ pages ) This is available on-line at the OOo web site,
and is included in the SDK download package.
Three is help with the API however, in the form of two addons available
on the net.
XRAY and ObjectInpsector - both allow you to interrogate objects and
there properties at runtime and both offer the ability to link to pages
in the API reference - roughly a context sensitive help on steroids.
*chuckling* - OK, let me step down off this high horse I seem to have
climbed up on.
The fact is there are couple of 'missing' pieces in the current Base GUI
implementation, IMO, that really do cause a much greater learning curve
then is necessary - not to mention that it, again IMO, forces users to
have to resort to scripting for things that should of been available
without. But with that said, most everything that a person would want a
desktop front end to a database to do, can be done.
* real laugh here*...and just to let you know - the way I introduced
myself to the mailing lists regarding Base and my learning experience
with it...well, I was not a happy camper to put it mildly, but it is
winning me over.
One final thought - do get onto a newer version of OOo, 2.0.4 is not
going to be satisfactory for a production system ( sorry, guys - just my
opinion again )
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