[PLUG] MS Access -> ? for OOo

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Mon Feb 11 06:05:11 UTC 2008


On Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:23:26 -0800
"M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb at cesmail.net> dijo:

> John Jason Jordan wrote:

> > Thanks for the suggestions. I'm still poking around for a solution.
> 
> How comfortable are you with scripting languages? It sounds to me like 
> you have the database part under control as long as you abandon all hope 
> of bending OpenOffice.org to your will. :) The rest of it -- generating 
> printed documents, reports, etc. -- sounds like something fairly easy to 
> do in one of the scripting languages, like Perl, Python or Ruby. All of 
> them have very user-friendly interfaces to databases, including SQLite, 
> and all of them can generate PDF documents. If you *must* have a 
> Microsoft document format, there are probably libraries available to 
> make them, but I've lived comfortably with PDFs for years.

I need the files in some kind of word processor format - OOo, KWord,
AbiWord or even RTF. As long as the file format supports at least
paragraph styles I can use it. The reason is because the data will have
numerous different destinations. One might be Scribus, one might be
Adobe InDesign, and occasionally even a local laser printer. However,
the text must still be editable when it gets into Scribus or InDesign,
therefore PDF will not do. Furthermore, I have massive additional
formatting that I must perform on the files before they end up in
Scribus or InDesign, all of which I do with macros in OOo. 

However, I have zero - and I mean absolutely zero - knowledge of
scripting or anything else requiring computer codes. I have tried
programming and I find it impossible to understand. I'm sure I could
learn, but the learning curve would be massive and I don't have the
time now. Besides, this is the only place I'd probably ever need it. It
would be a ridiculous amount of effort for me.

I do have one final backup strategy - open the database in MS Access
which I have installed in Windows 2000 that is running under
VirtualBox. In Access I can create queries to select the data, then
merge it into OOo/Windows. OOo/Windows does have the ability to merge
directly from an MS Access file, as did previous versions of OOo on
Linux. And eventually that capability will be restored to OOo/Linux.
But I steadfastly refuse to do it in Windows unless there is no other
reasonable way. I've got the data in Kexi / Sqlite3; it ought to be
possible to merge it into *some* word processor on Linux.

Thanks for the further thoughts, but let's forget about scripting. 



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