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On Thu, 13 May 2010 20:28:15 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> But I do agree that oobase isn't the best piece of software - I've used
>> it quite a bit for accessing things like Oracle tables, and the setup
>> could be a lot smoother. Supports ODBC and JDBC, though, so that's
>> something.
>
> Oracle is a nice product, but if you just want to store your phonebook
> or your CD collection, it's way way overkill. I will say one thing about
> MS Access: It may be an utterly crap DB engine, but if all you want to
> do is store and lookup a little bit of data, it's the most lightweight
> thing I've seen. You get the DB engine and a nice front-end and a design
> tool, all in one. It's not very *good*, but for small things it's
> right-sized.
Well, yeah - I'd be more inclined to use MySQL, but some apps on Linux to
do things like tracking a CD collection use SQLite on the backend (heck,
my newsreader uses it).
Jim
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Jim Henderson wrote:
> The go-oo implementation has a subset of VBA included in it (I understand
> it's a fairly sizeable subset, but I've never needed to use it).
I'll have to look and see what it does.
I'd still prefer REXX. :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
you literally shooting yourself in the foot.
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On Thu, 13 May 2010 20:29:29 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> I'm guessing JavaScript? (Or maybe even Java, of course...)
There is some Java support, yes.
Jim
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>> Oracle is a nice product, but if you just want to store your phonebook
>> or your CD collection, it's way way overkill. I will say one thing about
>> MS Access: It may be an utterly crap DB engine, but if all you want to
>> do is store and lookup a little bit of data, it's the most lightweight
>> thing I've seen. You get the DB engine and a nice front-end and a design
>> tool, all in one. It's not very *good*, but for small things it's
>> right-sized.
>
> Well, yeah - I'd be more inclined to use MySQL, but some apps on Linux to
> do things like tracking a CD collection use SQLite on the backend (heck,
> my newsreader uses it).
Sure. But you'd have to have MySQL installed, then you'd have to create
a folder to put the files in, then execute several dozen raw SQL
commands to manually build the database, create the log files, build the
tables, then you'd have to configure the access controls, and then you
can configure Base to talk to it.
In MS Access, you click "file > new", select a filename, and you're
done. See what I mean?
Of course, MySQL (and other DB engines) can do all sorts of other fancy
stuff that MS Access will never manage. (*cough* file security,
anybody?) But for simple things, it's much quicker.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> I'm guessing JavaScript? (Or maybe even Java, of course...)
It's really not a question of the language or whether you can script the
software from inside. It's a question of whether you can get it to talk to
the outside through scripts. You need to be able to have *one* script talk
to *multiple* tools. If you can't have one button that fills in the
appropriate stuff after talking to three different programs, it's just not
as useful a scripting language as the COM-based stuff. COM is to MS what
pipelines are to UNIX. If the script is stored only in the one tool and it
can't talk to scripts running inside another tool, it's like the shell
without pipes.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
you literally shooting yourself in the foot.
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Of course, MySQL (and other DB engines) can do all sorts of other fancy
> stuff that MS Access will never manage. (*cough* file security,
> anybody?) But for simple things, it's much quicker.
Yeah. Access is really MS's version of SQLite. It wasn't really intended for
end users to use it. It was so programmers would have a place to store stuff
their program used if they needed that sort of storage rather than
individual bulk files.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
you literally shooting yourself in the foot.
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>> For example, I asked Calc to draw a graph, and spent forever trying to
>> figure out how to add a secondary axis. As far as I can tell, they just
>> haven't got around to implementing that feature yet.
>
> What do you mean by a "secondary axis"?
Have series 1 plotted against the Y-axis scale at the left end of the
chart, and series 2 plotted against the (unrelated) Y-axis scale at the
right end of the chart.
Come to think of it, I think I also had trouble plotting a bar chart
with a line graph overlayed...
>> I will say this: The chart options layout is superior to Excel. Far more
>> logical grouping, options do what you'd actually expect them to do, etc.
>
> That's one of the nice things about OSS development - when you reach a
> critical mass of developers and get a good group of people who look at
> user needs, you end up with software that can meet the needs of more
> users and provide more options.
Linux used to be almost unusable. It's got a lot better... but now it
seems to have plataued out again. So it's not just a function of being OSS.
>> Writer works for simple tasks. Sometimes it's quite frustrating trying
>> to make it do what you want though. (I can't remember a specific example
>> right now.)
>
> There again, I don't have an issue with getting it to do what I want.
> You may be running up against a learning curve (don't expect it to be
> like MS Office, that's a starting point).
Oh, I *like* that it isn't like MS Office. It's just that certain things
are either well-hidden or just not implemented yet.
>>>> As I say, I sometimes use OO for fixing broken MSO documents. (MSO
>>>> itself is apparently too stupid to do this.)
>>> Indeed, I remember you mentioning that before.
>> Trouble is, it tended to chew up the formatting slightly. (I tried it
>> with files that weren't corrupted; same issue. It ate the company logo,
>> for example.) I imagine this is something they're probably working on
>> improving.
>
> What version have you used? Have you opened bugs on these issues?
To file a bug, I'd have to pin down exactly what it's doing wrong. Just
saying "I converted this document once and the headers came out wrong"
isn't going to help anybody. (Especially since I can't show them the
document. It's confidential commercial property, after all.)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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On Thu, 13 May 2010 21:26:07 +0200, Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
>
> It still makes me slightly nervous that I have an illegal copy of
> Borland TurboPascal 5.5 for DOS. I mean, as if Borland is going to
> *care* any more...
Especially since they released it for free more than eight years ago...
--
FE
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>>>> I tried KOffice. It works, but it doesn't seem to *do* very much, and
>>>> it's infuriatingly fiddly to operate. (Especially the spreadsheet. In
>>>> fact, I've yet to find any spreadsheet that works as well as Excel -
>>>> which is worrying, considering that Excel wasn't work fantastically.)
>>> oocalc works very well, I find.
>> I tried the spreadsheet from KOffice, Gnumeric, and OO Calc. I didn't
>> really like any of them. Calc has improved a bit since then, but it's
>> still a bit irritating to operate.
>
> "irritating" how? In that "it's not Excel", or in that you couldn't
> figure out the way to do specific things?
Things like when you press enter, it doesn't move down to the next line.
Little UI quirks like that. And also some bigger things, like not
supporting certain chart options.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Darren New wrote:
> Interestingly enough, Microsoft beat 1-2-3 by noticing that *most*
> people didn't use the spreadsheet for calculations. They used it as a
> list editor. MS added a whole bunch of list-manipulation operations,
> while 1-2-3 added a whole bunch of sophisticated math stuff, and Excel won.
It still irritates me how many people utter the works "Excel database".
People, IT'S NOT A DATABASE! >_< If you need a database, for the love of
God, USE A DATABASE! GRR!!
Sorry, rant over...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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