When we revisited Open Office Base recently, we were surprised to find a couple of neat nuggets. We had looked at Openoffice Base a while ago and thought they are making progress, but still not quite good enough to put to daily use. For other datasources you need to use linked tables and can't make design changes and browse a database as you can with Access Projects. Unfortunately MS Access Project only works with SQL Server. What an MS Access Project does is connect you with a specific SQL Server database and allow you to browse all the objects, create forms and reports etc against the objects etc.

Microsoft Access has a particular feature called Access Projects which ties it very closely with Microsoft SQL Server. One thing I always liked about Microsoft Access was the ease with which you could link to various different kinds of datasources and generate rapid queries and so forth.

However you can open MS Access databases in OOBase, but you can't take advantage of the forms and reports in an MS Access Database. Unfortuantely you can't just convert an access mdb to its format like you can with other Open office suite products - Word to Writer Writer to Word etc.

While it is not as feature rich as Microsoft Access, it has been getting increasingly better and has some unique features that even Microsoft Access lacks. OpenOffice Base is the equivalent of Microsoft Access in the OpenOffice Open source suite. For those who are not familiar with OpenOffice Base.

Open office setup