General advice request for starting with OOo

[donn]

Hello,

I have just joined the forum and would like to clarify some simple notions regarding which components of Ooo to start with. I am tasked with setting up and, hopefully, facilitating a number of office related issues. The fledgling manufacturing company is beginning to see growth and the idea is to streamline and track certain aspects of the business.

Am I right in thinking:
Setup a relational database for tracking customers, suppliers, orders, product / parts inventory, etc. Then use this as a source to automatically insert fields/values into invoice, order confirmation, shipping forms created with Calc? Or are documents such as these better handled with Writer and if so, can the calculations and input reflect changes to quantities of stock in the database? I am hoping to link as many components as possible so as to minimize data entry and to accurately report up to date criteria.

To summarize: Is it possible to link Base, Calc, and Writer to acheive these tasks? If so, is it better to design the database first and then proceed with invoice forms etc. ? What advantage or disadvantage should be considered if using Writer rather than Calc to design the office documents?

Thank you in advance for any considered suggestions.

[acknak]

I can't really give you any advice about your business, but maybe I can help get you oriented to OOo.

Standard, best practice is to set up a database to hold and manage all your data, and create forms--which are just Writer documents that contain special elements ("controls")--to enter and display data from the database, and reports to summarize and record data from the database.

OOo does not include such a database, but its Base component will allow you to connect with any of several that are available. Base does have a "built-in" database, but it is only appropriate for small projects. Base is primarily intended to act as a connection between the other OOo applications and a "real" relational database.

The wrench in that plan is that, while it takes just a couple of sentences to describe it, it is a huge amount of work for one person to set up from scratch. Further, it absolutely requires a deep technical knowledge to design and implement an effective database.

Many small organizations don't have the resources to put all that together, so they substitute a spreadsheet in place of the database, forms and reports. That makes it a lot easier and faster to get started, but makes a poor solution in the long run.

Hopefully someone else will have some pointers to more practical resources to get you started.