Monday, November 5, 2007

OpenOffice Base Intro

What can I say? In my experience with OpenOffice Base over the past couple weeks, I have grown to not like it at all. I understand that its new and its open source, so it will probably get better. I just feel that maybe a little more time could have been spent on making sure it had more functionality than it does right now. While creating the modules, I noticed that you can't copy and paste records successfully, which is a huge problem when you have multiple records that may need to be moved. Also, no matter what order I enter my records, every time I open a table they come back different. Also, changing the primary key in a table proved to be way more of a hassle than ever, often resulting in having to drop an entire table and start from scratch. Maybe its just my version of the software that acting like this? Or maybe there wasn't enough time spent on developing this application so that it could accomplish basic tasks. I am finding it increasingly difficult to help somebody learn how to use this program when I don't want to use it myself! I know that may sound bad; however, I do understand that the software is open source, and I understand that it will get better as more and more developers add to the overall OpenOffice Suite. I never really knew or cared much about open source apps, but I now have the opinion that this software was probably released prematurely, simply to jump on the open source apps bandwagon and make the product known.

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