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

MySQL, ODBC, OpenOffice haikus

[Anonymous Coward]

Install MySQL?
Better get support contract
Config files scattered

ODBC's pow'r
Links data hither and yon
Like many silkworms

Free office software
Fighting forces from Redmond
Freedom is power

Relevant comments
Readers like them, yes they do
Thoughtful minds welcomed

Lame haikus you say?
OK bub, then write your own
Not so easy, huh?

Trail of Tears?

[mr100percent]

Hey, I wouldn't use "Trail of Tears" as the headline.

The Trail of Tears was the forced emigration of Native Americans from the South to Oaklahoma. It was brutal and painful, and something that Americans don't like to talk about.

"In one of the saddest episodes of our brief history, men, women, and children were taken from their land, herded into makeshift forts with minimal facilities and food, then forced to march a thousand miles(Some made part of the trip by boat in equally horrible conditions). Under the generally indifferent army commanders, human losses for the first groups of Cherokee removed were extremely high... About 4000 Cherokee died as a result of the removal. The route they traversed and the journey itself became known as "The Trail of Tears" or, as a direct translation from Cherokee, "The Trail Where They Cried" ("Nunna daul Tsuny"). "

Re:Trail of Tears?

[monadicIO]

I'm no troll, and have nothing against the native Americans, and have no intention of making light of their sufferings.
However, why does everyone have to be sensitive to everything that might offend anyone?
I find the political correctness thing is now as bad as censorship - there are no laws against saying things, but you'll be demonized for the rest of your life for having said them.
I'm sure one day some PC guy will come along and ask us not to use C because controllers written in C were used in some bomber aircrafts (or something like that).

Re:MySQL haiku: get it right

[Chocolate Teapot]

Petty nitpicker
You spoiled the joke entirely
I thought it was good.

Re:Huh?

[Chazmyrr]

You're right. The guy hasn't paid his dues. He hasn't spent days poring over man pages. He hasn't spent hours trying to recompile his kernel to get it to recognize his NIC. He probably doesn't even know how to use xf86config.

Then again, maybe the point was you shouldn't have to be a wizard to get an office suite to talk to an odbc datasource. Maybe the point was that real people trying to do real work don't want to be a sysadmin. They just want to get their work done.

Re:Secret?

[Mr. Smoove]

It has been completed and is ready for inclusion in the next release of OOo (1.1) - the beta of which is due out towards the end of this month.

Re:Uh, he's a Linuxworld columnist?

[j_kenpo]

"I agree that it should be simpler to set up, but does Joe Sixpack really need to be designing databases?"

Absolutly, if Joe Sixpack works for a small freight, delivery or trucking company and needs to keep a small database of shipping, customers, destinations, and other small business related matters. Ive seen plenty of smaller companies (1 to 2 offices and handfull of employees) who do this with Access (mostly by means of the pre-built databases and templates, or a consultant/tech set one up for them). This is my point right here, instead of the "why would they" or the "should they be" mind set, it should be percieved from the "Ok, they are going to, so how can I make it easier for them".

TheJesusCandle steals someone's comment. Again.

[pnot]

I've seen Amazon reviews pasted into /. for a +5 Informative, but I have to admire your sheer gall in pasting in a comment on the same thread from half an hour ago.

Good idea, though. This being Slashdot, nobody checks for dupes ;-).

Hmm, looks like this is a habit of yours. I'm continually amazed that people consider /. karma a sufficiently precious commodity to bother with this kind of thing...