Base - Opening an MSAccess MDB

[Hawk]

I am a newbie that just found OpenOffice. I am impressed with Writer and Calc but I am having trouble with Base which I assumed to be similar to MS Access. I cannot open a n MDB created with Access 2003. I also am having trouble just opening base and creating a table.

When I open Base it asks if I want to open an existing database file. When I navigate to the MDB and try to open it the Base window closes and nothing happens.

Is Base a full feature end-user database application? I am not a developer or programmer. The database I was trying to open is a very simple flat table and nothing more at this point.


Any help to get me started is very much appreciated.

[Villeroy]

No, Base is *not* a replacement for Access. The difference amounts to a decade of development and many millions of dollars. Base bundles a free third party database engine http://hsqldb.org, some helper tools and Writer to show forms and reports. Nevertheless you can connect to many types of databases just like MSAccess can be used as frontent to many "real" databases such as MSSQL and Oracle.
On a Windows system you should be able to use mdb files as data sources for read-write access. This requires some drivers by Microsoft and some setup.
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/MSA-Base_Faq

[sfureman]

I am also having problems viewing an Access MDB. When I attempt to view the table listings (using Staroffice 8 *or* Open Office) the application crashes. I have searched for program updates, version updates and patches. Since my MDB is HUGE I am now looking at disk space issues, available memory issues, etc. If I find a fix I will list it here.

[pjtomli1]

The only thing you can do is, as above, use the database connection wizard in OpenOffice Database to connect to the .mdb file as an ADO database connection, using Jet 4.0 driver. One connected it will ask you if you want to save the file as an ODF, OpenOffice format. I doubt there is a way to export it as a .mdb, as per the aforementioned reasons!

I'm using OpenOffice 2.4.1.