Trail of Tears: MySQL, ODBC, & OpenOffice 1.0

Joe Barr writes " I found a wonderful "how-to" piece called "OpenOffice.org 1.0, ODBC and MySQL," by John McCreesh. In the introduction, McCreesh writes about OpenOffice.org 1.0's "best kept secret" -- that secret being the fact that hidden away inside, completely unknown to most OpenOffice users, is a user-friendly front end for databases that is "a Microsoft Access (and more) equivalent." That may be so, but there is a very good reason why it's a secret: it's too damn hard getting OpenOffice and ODBC wired up correctly."

Comments

Re:Trail of Tears?

[abe ferlman]

However, why does everyone have to be sensitive to everything that might offend anyone?

Because (1) it's not nice to offend people and (2) it's important to understand that offense is in the eye of the offended, not the offender.

If you are not strange, you wouldn't like it if I walked up to your mother and called her a two-dollar whore. It's not censorship to suggest that this is a bad idea, it's common decency.

I imagine you're not part of a culture where flip references to your history can be offensive, but there are people who are and it's just common decency to not be a jerk to those people, especially when a similar phrase would do just fine (Path of pain, tutorial of terror, whatever :)

No one's going to ask you not to use C, there's a clear differentiation between the tool and the motivation of the user in your example. But it wouldn't be out of line to ask a software project to change it's name if it were genuinely offensive.

People who complain about political correctness, in my experience, complain because they say such awful things, for instance, they'll say "this may not be politically correct, but" then tell a mean-spirited N-word joke or the like.

There's the caricature version of political correctness (vertically challenged, etc.), and then there's common decency- too often people engaging in the latter are viciously attacked for engaging in the former.

Re:Something open source?

[MikeFM]

The first time I tried it I connected it both to MySQL and M$ Access inside of 15 minutes having never used either OpenOffice or ODBC before. It wasn't difficult at all. I didn't like it and went back to my own way of doing things but it wasn't difficult to setup. I'd say if you have trouble with the setup you really don't want to be messing with databases without a more experienced user to guide you. Try IRC or a mailing list - lots of help is available.