How do I make use of openoffice base?

I have been developing in MS Access for a while now, roughly 1 year and counting, at the same time I’m also an avid fan of open source software. I’m especially interested in open office as an replacement for MS Access where money would be an issue i.e third world countries without the ability to purchase the relevant licenses.

I intend to explore the different function and features of open office base, hopefully create an sample base application on the way, I suppose it would be more of a learning experience on finding out how to do comparable things in base as compared to MS Access.

First most important step would be downloading the software from the site itself, you can get it from OpenOffice Website. As Base requires Java Runtime to work, there is an option to have the download with JRE included.

As I’m trying to get more users from Access to Base, I would try and learn Base on MS Windows.

Installation on MS Windows is pretty straight forward, just run the setup file that you’ve downloaded from the OpenOffice website. After installation you should be able to launch Base and get the default screen as shown below.

Fig 1. Database wizard

There are few choices listed in the database wizard, for our learning purpose we would just go with the default ‘Create a new database’ selection. You can also choose to ‘Open an existing database’ if you already have one. The more interesting selection would be the third one ‘Connect to an existing database’. This is important as it would allow you to connect to other database backend like MySql, MS Access or MS SQL. All which supports more than one users, which is an advantage as compared to the built-in HSQL datatbase format which only supports one user. More details one configuration of connection can be found here and here.

After you’ve selected the create new database and named your database file, you will be presented with a quite familiar interface, on the left hand column where you can select the different elements to manage, and on the right hand column you would be able to see the different elements and actions that can be done.

Well that’s all for the first post, hope you’ve enjoyed it and please do let me know if there are any wrong information presented here as I’m learning openoffice base from a MS Access developer’s viewpoint.