Patrick's Rants

I’m working on getting some reports done for the bus barn. My boss asked me for a pretty complex set of numbers. Numbers that you just don’t get from a spreadsheet. Don’t get me wrong, spreadsheets are and will be involved, they just aren’t complex enough to get what I want without learning some serious Visual Basic (yech!). I guess I’m just more familiar with running a quick and dirty query against the data. But that’s just me. It took a couple of days (and working in Dispatch, that’s just the nature of the beast) to get multiple spreadsheets dragged into Access (because it’s there) and run the query that I needed. But I did learn that I can use OpenOffice.org Base just as easily.

What I ended up doing was taking the spreadsheet data, exporting that to csv files and then importing into Access. Access is pretty easy to do, inside and Access file (with Access open) click on new table, import and browse to the csv file you want. You can modify the field types and then import the file. Do that with each table you want. Access works fairly quickly importing the file.

In OpenOffice.org Base, first you have to create a new database. Once your database is created you have to open the csv file. The csv file will open in a spreadsheet (OpenOffice.org Calc). Select the data you want, (Ctrl-A for all, Ctrl-C to copy to clipboard) and then on the table section of Base, click Ctrl-V or Edit -> Paste on the menu. Depending upon the size of the table this might take a little while. Repeat for each csv file you want as a table. And now my joins work! (They don’t work when you use the csv files as your database. You must use the built in hsqldb engine to get real database behavior)