I’m interested in creating a project that allows a non-technical user to import a simple CSV file containing financial transactions, and then display various analyses of this data in several different tables and charts.
It seems to me that Calc will display the tables and charts that I need for this project. Calc is able to easily import the CSV file. Where I’m having a problem is displaying this data in a useful way.
Pivot tables in Calc seem like an obvious way to go, but I can’t seem to figure out how to get pivot tables to do any sort of complex calculations in how they display data, or even format the data they’re pulling in. I’d like to be able to display tables that are a subset of other tables, but pivot tables don’t seem to be able to do that either, unless there’s a SUM or grouping column.
I thought that perhaps putting the data into Base, and then pulling it out via various SQL statements into the charts and graphs would be more straightforward, but Base seems to be limited to only working on local flat files (ie: I can’t even open a database file on a local file share), so I don’t know if it is designed to act as an actual database, or some sort of shim to do facilitate moving data from one place to another.
Is there a workflow or application design that will let me do what I want inside of Libreoffice?