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Open Office
Looking Things Up In The Manuals

filename: fdb8lookup.htm

You may find that the database which is part of LibreOffice/ OpenOffice delights you as much as it has me. This page tries to help you use it.

Remember that LibreOffice / OpenOffice, including the database manager, is free! But don't let that fool you. And it's not new. Big organizations, government and civilian, are adopting it as their standard office suite... and saving million$, but still Getting The Job Done.

There's more about their database manager 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. With most browsers, pressing plus, minus or zero while the control key (ctrl) is held down will change the texts size. (Enlarge, reduce, restore to default, respectively.) (This is more fully explained, and there's another tip, at my Power Browsing page.)

Page contents © TK Boyd, 2/06-6/20, Sheepdog Software



Looking Things Up...

Hey! I hate to ask for directions when I'm lost as much as the next (male?) person... but sometimes you just have to RTFM. ("Read The... famous?... Manual")

When you reach that in extremis moment, the following places can help....



First Consider...

The source of help I usually consult is the suite's forum. I refer to that so often, that I have consolidated my help for you at my page about LibreOffice and Open Office forums, etc.


For the moment... FOR LibreOffice, my "documentation recommendations" are to be found as part of fdb1forums.htm


Reference manuals for the Open Office database...

(There's more general Open Office help further down the page.)

The HSQLdb website online documentation... in frames

Alternatively, go to....

The HSQLdb website online documentation... frameless

... for the same information in a format I prefer... but if you use that, you'll have to know that it is often worth going to the root of a site, in this case....

http://www.hsqldb.org/

... to see what other Good Stuff someone has posted for you.

If you start using things from the HSQLdb manual, the time may come when you need to learn the details of turning off ooBase's SQL checking mechanisms.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"What?" I hear you exclaim. "HSQLdb? I want the ooBase manual!" Well, yes... but ooBase is based on the HSQLdb engine. Now you see?

The link I gave above is for the table of contents. It tells you everything. "Too Much Information", big time.

If you just want to look up, say, what the rules are for the CONCAT string manipulation function, start at the table of contents the section for the HyperSQL User Guide. As that stood, April 2020, you'd want...

10. Built In Functions

    Overview
    String and Binary String Functions...

... wouldn't you?



Help with other aspects of Open Office...

(The following also offer further help with ooBase.)

(This comment from YEARS ago at 4/2020 is probably dated!)... The documentation can be extremely frustrating. I must confess that my failure to navigate it easily has lead to me being not very familiar with it. Perhaps if I used it more I would learn to love it. Searches for things which I know are present, e.g. "ConvertFromURL", seem to be finding the excellent relevant pages better than once they did.

If using the site's own search tools turn up nothing, you can try giving Google something like...

site:wiki.services.openoffice.org ConvertFromURL

It turned up the right page... along with 7 other hits.

* Guide to ooBasic.... the language of OpenOffice macros...

The OpenOffice.org page where the ooBasic guide starts. The once-flawed search engine may remain a problem. You may find that digging in the "Runtime library" section turns up Good Stuff, depending on what you are looking for. (A lot of what I wanted was there.)

* Guide to OO API.... the "things" Open Office is built from, e.g. getByName. They (I'm pretty sure) underlie all of Open Office. How you get to them, directly, with ooBasic I'm not so sure about.

The "things" include what I would call objects, methods and properties. The nice people at Open Office use the term "service" for some things I think of... quite possibly ignorantly... as objects. Not everything I call an object is a service. Some of the things I call methods they call functions. We both use "property" the same way... I think! The API guide also tells you about other useful things. If you want to become a skilled OpenOffice programmer, it would probably be very wise to attempt to master "What is a thingie", where "thingie" can equal...

Don't be overwhelmed by that list. It really isn't as bad as it seems.

The Guide is at this OpenOffice.org page

There's an overview of the Open Office "official" documentation at, sensibly enough, www.openoffice.org/documentation/. There you will find search tools for different sections of the material.





Editorial Philosophy

I dislike 'fancy' websites with more concern for a flashy appearance than for good content. For a pretty picture, I can go to an art gallery. Of course, an attractive site WITH content deserves praise... as long as that pretty face doesn't cost download time. In any case....

I am trying to present this material in a format which makes it easy for you to USE it. There are two aspects to that: The way it is split up, and the way it is posted. See the main index to this material for more information about the way it is split up, and the way it is posted.


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