Hi I also used to be an Access developer. When I came over the fence to Linux (2008) I looked for an equivalent tool and made the assumption that LibreOffice Base would fit the bill. I spent several months off and on attempting to reproduce the sort of user interfaces and functionality that are simple and commonplace in Access. The single most limiting factor is the form designer. Because a Base form is really a variant of a Writer document you have a lot less control over the general appearance and visual wizardry which you can employ. At best a Base application GUI looks like something from the very early days of Visual Basic. The programming language (a Basic variant) is powerful, but you often need a lot of code to achieve what may require one or two lines in Access. If you've ever created a GUI in Visual C++ and the same in VB/VBA then you will appreciate the scale of the difference. I found the native HSQL database to be very slow once the tables start getting large - at least in its LibreOffice implementation. You would be better off connecting to a different engine. MySQL gave pretty good performance, but then you are moving outside the core Access concept. Eventually I gave up on Base and looked around for something else. I discovered Gambas, which is a development environment using the Basic programming language. It's very close to VB in both concept and implementation - in fact better in many ways. This can connect to a SQLite database in 4 lines of code. You can use explicit coding to interface with the database but Gambas also provides data objects and bound controls. With SQLite as a single-file database, a Gambas + SQLite application is as close to an analog for Access as you will find on Linux, with much the same level of developer-friendly functionality as Access provides as well. The latest couple of versions of Access (post ribbon) have introduced massive amounts of bloat and become more cumbersome for the developer. Gambas avoids all that, making it a pleasure to use. In brief, Base is the one module of LibreOffice which falls well short of its Microsoft equivalent. It has its uses for simple tasks like mail-merge but as a development environment I would avoid it. In my view, for the Access developer migrating to Linux, Gambas + SQLite is the way to go. If you're still on Windows then you're best to bite the bullet and stick with Access. http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html https://sqlite.org/ Just writing this is giving me ideas for an HPR episode...... Regards Nige (aka Beeza)
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