I'm new to OpenOffice Base.
But I think I'm catching on fast.
I've created a Data Base in Open office and created a form for it.
what I want to do now is convert the .odb files that is saved and convert it to a csv text file with a shell script so I can display the output on my webserver (apache) with a CGI script.

But I can't find anything to convert ODB files to csv.

If some one can suggest a program to do this or if there is a better way to do this (which I'm sure there is) please let me know or point me to a tutorial.

Thanks

Well, I hate to tell someone that what he or she is doing seems to be completely on the wrong track, and that one should use approach ABC instead of XYZ.

Using OOBase is fine if that is you application, but creating and maintaing a database in Base, exporting it every time and interface the result to a web server is extremely cumbersome. It also means that you have to re-export the database to CSV every time you changed it.

I can recommend that you have a look at MySQL. It is a database server which can interface easily with your web server thru perl, cgi or PHP. To get your data into MySQL there exist a number of front ends (including OOBase if I am not mistaken) But you can also use text import, bash scripting or command line input.

There is almost no learning curve for MySQL, follow the tutorial (chapter 3 in the MySQL documentation on www.mysql.com). It makes your life easier if you want to access your data over the web.

jlinkels

I found this thread, looking for the answer to the original question.

Here is the answer.
Based on OO3

I built a query to filter by original database.
Punched all kinds of buttons looking for export... never found it.
BUT...
They did make it simple... maybe too simple.

* Opened a spreadsheet window full screen
* brought smaller window of query result to forground
* hit the button at the bottom to go to the "end" of the query.
* hit the top left corner (above row numbers, left of column names) with mouse to select all records.
* drug (dragged?) the same corner to cell A1 of the spreadsheet
* Whalla! it copied the results of the query to the spreadsheet.
* just did save as CSV at that point and the project was done.

Thought someone else would like the details, since two of use spent near an hour each looking through menus, and right clicks, etc... nothing obvious.
Just got lucky with the drag thing.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks kvanderw - you certainly helped me with this.

Wow, this was a long time ago, and jlinkels is right.
I don't even remember asking this question or why I was trying to do this.
I'm sure I had my reasons.