I don’t see any gap. You create the split DB. Have the Base file (split DB) open at at the Tables section which is blank - no tables yet created. Now the spreadsheet. The first row of the sheet should have column descriptions. These will be used for Field names. The rest of the rows are your data. Select ALL rows starting with the descriptions. When all selected, right mouse click & select Copy. Then on the blank table area, right click & select Paste.
At this point a dialog appears. Give it table name & make sure “Definition and append data” is selected. The rest is just in case you want to change field names or data types. When you Finish, the table should be accessible. In a split DB you cannot modify fields in the normal UI. You can add or delete fields but modify must be done through SQL.
OK, the key point that was not illustrated anywhere (the gap) was that one must paste the spreadsheet’s clipboard data into the area of the “Tables”, which was misleading because right above that are three ways to create a table. I misunderstood it to mean that I had to create a table in some manner first, then paste the entries.
Now that I have progressed through those steps, one question comes up… I would like to set the ‘Record’ field to be the ‘Key’ field. Not sure how to do that, yet.
Open the new table in edit mode. Right click table name & select Edit. Not sure if you created a Key during copy process. If so, delete it - right click leftmost grey box on unwanted line & select Delete. To set key field, right click leftmost grey box on line with key field wanted & select Primary Key. Save the table design.
Just for future reference, the instructions were actually referring to the menu selection Edit->Paste. This would have produced the same results as right clicking in the blank table area. There was nothing about mouse clicking, just “choose”.
Alright… I pretty much got the start of this going.
I do have one question on the DB side of this thing… is the Calc spreadsheet linked to the Base DB in the split setup? If I make a change to one, will it reflect in the other, or are they separate?
Are the editing features of Base the same as in Calc? (I have come to realize just how unclean this spreadsheet is due to the person who maintained it before me, so I need to go through and clean it up… spellings, syntax, grammar, etc.)
Once I get this thing set up, I will need to focus on the CD Label design… not sure where to go from here for that… Draw? Write? Form Designer? a combination? With the Avery software, it was relatively simple to just insert and position fields, but the printable area was already established in the Template Design… not sure how to do any of that with this database, or where.
The MAIN-MAIN goal of all of this is to get things set up to put this info on our website for distribution reasons.
The DB is separate from Calc. The data was duplicated in Base from Calc. No connection. There is no checking in Base with the exception of what individual controls and or table Fields are set to edit. LO docs are here.
As for the actual label processing, that is all explained in my original answer including having a template to work with.
I’ve got my template open (.ott), and have a query in it, and pulled a field onto the ‘label’. I’m at a loss on how to manipulate things from there… all that I can do is to hit enter to make it go up or down… I can’t seem to figure out how to position the field where I want it. (This is not as intuitive as I would have hoped.)
Working with the LO-W Guides (10,11,14), I’m not really finding how you positioned the fields on your example. Again, seems like there’s an information gap. Help?
I added a screenshot of the field positioning issue.
This is just a word processor. Use to go to a newline, spaces to position the cursor to where you want the field. Then drag & drop the field wanted to the cursor location. Wherever the cursor is, you can put your field there.
A second look at your Query results shows more than 41 records were selected. It appears you may not have set this up properly in Base. The number of records in the query should only be what was input on the record selection form. The sample clearly shows the form, table and query for this. You can check the query result in Base by entering the selections, then running the query to see the selected records match what was selected.
Placed edit in DB instructions in answer to hopefully clarify the structure of the Base file.
The 41 records that were selected are just those in the column at the time. If I click on the “Last Record” (arrow with a vertical line on the right side of the point), it will show the 4,598th record… apparently if you don’t go the last record upon opening the Query, the number stops at only the 2nd page-down’s end value, which happened to be 41 here.
I clicked on the column ‘Record’ and dragged (drug?) it to my template in order to insert the field.
Your answer “Wherever the cursor is, you can put your field there.” tells me that there are no graphical means of dragging a field to the spot that I want it. I get the impression that I have to treat this like a single cell of spreadsheet table, with spaces and newlines, which is going to present a problem when I try to do a ‘text along a curve’ across the top and bottom of the disc label
I did state more than 41 records. There is no sense in having a query which only duplicates the entries in the table. The purpose of the query is to present only selected records for printing.
As for ‘curved’ text, as stated earlier, labels are not my expertise. Not certain this can be done. Will try to look into this later.
EDIT: At this point, I don’t see any way to curve the text for a data field.
At this point I don’t care if there are one or a million records in a query, I’m still trying to get to the reason I posted here in the first place… to design or use an existing label template that uses my data for the purpose of printing onto Avery Label 5697 (while simultaneously be able to enter new records into the DB) in the manner I depicted in my image. Every leap that I make seems to land me short of the lily pad and I end up having to back-peddle and go a different direction.
Don’t know what print labels and simultaneously enter new DB records means. I see nowhere in this entire process of back-peddling and going a different direction. From the original answer it has all been the same direction. I have gone beyond the original question asked and tried to help you when not understanding documents or giving advice in avoiding future problems (split DB). You are trying to learn Base (and its’ many aspects), Templates in LO, Writer formatting, and next Mail Merge.
All this in a very short span of time. Now if you want to skip steps, go ahead, but don’t complain about getting help. Not every piece of software does everything exactly how you wish it to work for you.
Now, as stated in my comment, I don’t see any way to curve a DATA field. However, another look at you CD sample leads me to believe the curved text you want is fixed text. This can be done using Fontwork - see sample in my answer & Chapter 11 in getting started guide.
I thank you. I really do. I’m just not ‘getting there from here’… yet. Probably going to take me a while to get through all of this and do what I need it to do. (I’m having challenges here at home keeping me from focusing… not your fault.)
The ‘simultaneous’ comment is to use this setup to not only print labels from the database, but also to enter the information into the database. I was expecting to be able to design or use a template to do both.