Dear folks – I have recently switched from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. I am pleased to say that so far that switch has been quite painless. For all the areas where I have made extensive use of the Microsoft Office components – basically Word, Excel, and Powerpoint ( I have previously switched all my Outlook functions over to Google) the equivalent LibreOffice program has been comparably powerful and easier to use. Bravo!
However, I now find myself in need of a way to create and use a database. I have made almost no use of databases previously (except using other people’s databases through interfaces that other people have written) and I have already established that I have a lot to learn. I need a database primarily because I am dealing with files (from the U.S. Census & Bureau of Labor Statistics) that are bigger than Calc will open. Ultimately I will be doing this analysis in some mix of Calc and R, but in both cases I would like to do as much preprocessing via database as possible to avoid line limits (in Calc) and memory limits (in R). I will not be doing anything particularly complicated – mainly loading .csv OR tab-delimited flat files and then pulling out rows and columns, with perhaps some substitutions, mathematical or logical operations, and maybe calculating summary statistics on some subsets (e.g. on records by state or by racial category).
This brings me to my question: Is Base in OpenOffice pretty much the same as Base in OfficeLibre at the level of sophistication and complexity that I am talking about? Because I am finding a lot more beginner’s guides, video tutorials, and and blogs and such that explain how to do particular basic tasks using OpenOffice than LibreOffice. I assume that this is just because they have been around longer, but I would like to know if I can trust these learning materials in most basic (no pun intended) cases for guidance on OfficeLibre Base. Can I? And if I can, are there good beginner’s materials I can refer to that would help me in the cases where they are different?
Any help and guidance I can get would be much appreciated. I am using LibreOffice 4.2.1.1 under Windows 7 64-bit with Service Pack 1.
Warmest regards, andrewH