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Open Office 2 Base (database) Tutorials

Setting Up Open Office and ooBase

You may find that the database being shipped with OpenOffice (ver.2) delights you as much as it has me. This page, and the others linked to it, can help you use it.

Forget any experiences you may have had with Adabas, which came with Star Office, the commercial version of Open Office 1. The Open Office Version 2 database, "Base", aka "ooBase", is unrelated. And remember that Open Office, including Base, is free! But don't let that fool you. It's not new. Big organizations, civil and governmental, are adopting it as their standard office suite... and saving million$.

There's more about ooBase in the main index to this material.

This page is "browser friendly". Make your browser window as wide as you want it. The text will flow nicely for you. It is easier to read in a narrow window.

Page contents © TK Boyd, Sheepdog Software ®, 2/06.

You've just set up ooBase, and it is working.... sort of...

I'm not going to say much about how you install Open Office (version 2), which will install ooBase as one of it's components. I'm not going to say much because the process is automated well, and there are better places to seek help with installations, and because I only know about installing it on a Windows system, and you, gentle reader, may be using Linux or something else. (One of the great strengths of Open Office!)

When you have ooBase set up... sort of... (i.e. it will start, even if it doesn't work quite correctly), and if you are working on a Windows machine, then read the rest of this if your ooBase is "being weird". (You lucky Linux people won't have the problem this fixes, I don't think. Do write and tell me if that's wrong, please!?)

It may be that the problem isn't with Open Office....

This page is published to give you the following short note an an issue that some readers may need to deal with. If you find it fixes something for you, please

To use Base, your system must have a Java run time environment/ engine, aka RTE, aka JRE. Don't be put off by this... it isn't a big deal, and you may already have one. The RTE is used for other things anyway, any one of which you may have installed already, and the RTE to go with it. Much of Open Office will work without an RTE, but not Base. Also: once you have the RTE, other parts of Open Office will do more. And you won't need to go through it all again a little further down the road when you want to install one of the other things that use it.

I'm no fan of adding things to my computer's system, but sometimes something is worth the nuisance and risk. I believe that the Java RTE is an example.

Not only must you have the RTE, but it must be the right one, and Base must be using that one, not another. You may have more than one RTE on your computer. (At 6/2007, the OpenOffice site was saying "For full functionality, jdk/jre 1.4.0_02 or newer or jdk/jre 1.4.1_01 or newer is required", but that, may, of course change in the future.)

If Base just won't start, or is being weird, check your Java RTE as follows:

- Start an Open Office text document. (Yes... text document!)
- Click on the menu entry Tools
- Click on the sub menu entry Options
- If the "OpenOffice.org" heading has a + ion front of it, click
       on the + to make it a -, and display the tree of sub-options
- Click on "Java", and hold your breath! Don't be alarmed
       if no JAVA RTEs show
- After a moment or two, you should see one or more RTEs.
- Select the one with a version id starting 1.5... or higher.
- Close everything.
- Try Base again!    :-)

I hope that fixed everything? If not, there are many people waiting to help you in various places. The Open Office forums are excellent. If you have to post a request for help, a thread name like "Base says Error 57" is more likely to get a response than "Newbie needs help". Another good place to go is Google's groups service. If you are not familiar with the latter, you should try it. You will have to do some "panning for gold". (That metaphore is so much more encouraging than "sorting wheat from chaff", which might also be used.) There is a lot of rubbish to skim though, in order to find the flecks of gold, but there is gold there! Build your panning skills, and you may find yourself a regular user of groups.google.com. There's more on using a newsgroup or forum at my page on the subject.

Oh yes! What if you don't have the Java RTE?

If you downloaded OpenOffice from the official site in June 2007 (or, presumably thereafter, and for some time before), you may have the JRE without realising it. There's a "include the Java JRE" (another name for the RTE) tickbox on the OpenOffice suite download page. Whether it installs automatically along with the Suite, I don't know. I would guess it does.

If you already have a suitable Java installed on your machine before you install the OpenOffice suite, then there is no need to download the OpenOffice.org installer with Java.

Some older machines may be infested with a version of "Java" that Microsoft was once distributing. For once, the courts managed to do something with them, and that "initiative" went away. I think the problem is resticted to Windows 98 machines. If you know better, and/ or can remind me of links the the uninstall instructions, do please let me know? (The MS "Java" os NOT suitable for the OpenOffice suite... what a surprise.)

If you have a "too old" version of the RTE, or chose not to download the Java RTE when you download OpenOffice.org (or just forgot about it) you can install Java afterwards, as explained here.

If you don't have the RTE, for many platforms (Windows, Linux, etc) you can get it free from http://java.sun.com/. You go to the Java SE Downloads page, go a little way down it to the "Java Runtime Environment (JRE)" link, follow that, and collect the "Java Runtime Environment (JRE) SE Runtime Environment" which is right for your system. (You don't need the SDK.) There are good installation notes there for you. Be sure you download the right RTE for your operating system... there are versions for Windows (different flavors for 32-bit and 64-bit systems), Linux, and others.

People using Macs should visit the "about Java" page on www.apple.com.

Which Java RTE version should you download? Generally speaking, always try for the latest stable release. Even if the OpenOffice site is talking, say, about Java RTE 5, if Java RTE 6 is available, try that first. If you have problems, go to the OpenOffice site, or the Setup section of the OpenOffice forum, and see what people are saying about matches (or otherwise!) between different versions of the RTE and the OpenOffice suite.

If the advice on this did fix something for you, please write and tell me the "symptoms" your machine was showing? I went through all of this so long ago myself that I can't remember what my ooBase was doing before I gave it the right RTE! (Contact info just a little further down the page.)

One such person wrote in. They had a database set up, had a table, had a form. Form had a navigation bar on it.... BUT! The navigation buttons were greyed out, and he couldn't get a context menu for the navigation bar while in form design mode. See how deceptive this problem can be? You would expect a program to WORK, or NOT WORK, wouldn't you? Imagine being able to do so much without the right RTE!

From here you can return to my ooBase Tutorials main menu, or just jump to the first tutorial specific to "Base".

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