Hi I used to be a fairly serious Access developer and faced much the same issue when I made the move to Linux. In my view OpenOffice/LibreOffice Base is by far the weakest part of the otherwise excellent office suite. Its native HSQL database is slow and the form designer is very limited in functionality compared with Access. Also the form appearance is archaic. Its biggest plus is that is it easy to link to many other kinds of DB such as MySQL and PostgreSQL, but you still don't get very good performance. My other big criticism is that the programming language (a variant of Basic) makes heavy weather of many features which VBA achieves with ease. To manipulate the GUI you have to think more in terms of how Visual C++ does things rather than VBA. My solution is to use the Gambas development tool with a backend database to suit the application requirements. Gambas is very similar to VB in many ways, and better in some. The language syntax is similar. If you've used VB or Access/VBA you'd get used to Gambas pretty quickly. You can create very sophisticated GUIs and also compile to an executable. The executable requires the presence of a runtime library - another similarity with VB - but it means you don't have to deliver the code and form designs along with executable. You can use data-bound controls or write your own code to read/write between form controls and the database, using the "Result" object, which equates to an Access "Recordset". Although it requires a few more lines of code I prefer this latter method as it gives you total control over what gets updated and when. Gambas can natively talk to a number of DB types. If you use SQLite (a file database) the analogy with Access is almost complete. Using Gambas/SQLite I've managed to create >10,000 records in a second during bulk updates. Base/HSQL couldn't come anywhere near this kind of performance. Hope this helps. By all means contact me off-forum if you want to discuss the nitty-gritty that would otherwise cause eyes to glaze over. Nige
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