Bruce
bbruen at unwired.com.au
Sun Jan 25 06:33:13 CST 2009
On Sunday 25 January 2009 12:13:59 Arthur Fuller wrote: > You can move the basics to Base, but you lose VBA, so if it's anything > serious that you wrote, no go. Just out of curiosity, does anyone know if > there's a reason why a Linux vendor couldn't license VBA to work in that > environment? Maybe they just expect that if you want to go in that > direction, you'd use Mono. Just a guess, but even then, Open Office runs > under Windows too, so that ought to mean that VBA could be licensed. No? > > On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 5:08 PM, Stuart McLachlan <stuart at lexacorp.com.pg>wrote: > > Should be titled Elevn Tips for Moving your Word Processer to > > OpenOffice.org. > > It really says nothing about the rest of the suite - especially Access > > :-( Well, having tried this for some time ( now into years ). OO Calc does support/translate Excel VBA almost completely. Base is just not up to the game yet. There are linux based products that do provide some of the VBA implementation. However these projects are both in their infancy and unfortunately fairly sparcely supported by the FSS community. I presume that you folks are talking about running OO under Windows. So I can't really add a great deal of value here. But, there are a few projects, albeit non Jet based that are trying to achieve an equivalent desktop db useability using backends such as postgreSQL and my(whatever, guess my preference). There is even some work going on regarding ?O?9i. (Mono is a great project and I support its' goals completely. However, it does seem (IMSO) to be based on catch up with .net rather than providing an equivalent functionality using proven *nix toolkits and benefits.) I tend to think that the underlying cause, rather than the symptom, is that most of these people are quite C/C++ experts and while the idea of providing high level end user toolkits such as VBA might be ethically acceptable just isn't worth their trouble. I'm not having a go at anyone here, but if you can do it with the tools in your toolbox, why try and build a better toolbox? Don't get me wrong. I still use Access considerably in my day to day work at clients. It is so far ahead of anything else available it is totally inconcevable to me that M$ would actually consider dumping it. It takes me minutes to configure a db to collect and analyse any dataset, construct the needed queries (HAH! try that with O*a*c* D*v*l*p*r!!!!!), create forms, graphs, reports etc etc .... etc. I just wish there was a equivalent FOS product. Unfortunately, it aint there yet. But then again, the entire cognos of FOS is based on the community that exists to solve their common problems. Hey, come on across! bruce