Our small business did it. A year without WinXP

John Winters

The OO database feature (in 1.0) is lame compared to Access. Access is a complete programming and reporting environment. You can easily put up data-entry screens with logic coded (in VB) behind them. And it has a very robust and easy to use report writer. It's the best thing MS has ever put out and not having something similar in Linux is a drawback.

MySQL is a terrific database but there is no front-end to it that compares with the power and ease-of development of Access. You can put together some very sophisticated applications in very little time with Access. I'm surprised the FOSS world has never tried to come up with something similar... and integrated database, programming langauge, widgets, and reporting system. If there ever is an Access-like application for Linux, it would be something we'd pay for in a New York minute. I've always thought the TrollTech folks would come up with an Access-For-Linux, or maybe The Kompany, but so far it hasn't happened.

Seems to me a bright group of engineers could cobble together Python or Java with some standard screen widgets (dropdowns, radio buttons, etc.) into an IDE like Eclipse and add in something like DataVision report writer and the new LiteSQL and that would be that!

Very simple. Our consulting practice gets a lot of bid requests and proposal requests (RFB, RFP) from the state (of CA) in Word. Many of these are heavily formatted with tables and graphics which OO does not handle too well. Also, I think the interface to OO is terrible and I like Word better. Thus we use it.

However, we find that OO does a very good job on Excel spreadsheets so we've never bothered to load that on Crossover. Gnumetric is also good with Excel.

We're hoping the new OO 2.0 when it comes out will be 100% Word compatible and if so we will be a 100% Linux shop.

Al C.

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