Use LibreOffice Base: A Beginners Guide

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Dedication

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This book is dedicated to Dean Wesley Smith for all his help.

1 Getting Started – Creating a Table

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What is LibreOffice Base?

LibreOffice Base is a program supplied with the LibreOffice Productivity Suite that allows you to create, manage and run databases. In many ways it’s similar to Access although it is free and provides you with the ability to record information such as:

Company address books

Inventory

Time sheet information

Employee records

Or almost anything else that you can think of.

LibreOffice Base also interfaces with larger databases systems such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, or MySQL. Because of this ability as your company grows the systems that you create in LibreOffice Base can grow without change being obvious to the end user.

Best of all, when you’re a small company you don’t really want to spend a lot of money on database systems. LibreOffice Base is a free solution that had most of the functionality of programs that are much more expensive to use.

What is a Database?

Throughout this book we’re going to use some difficult terminology, so I’ll try to explain it while I’m going along. One of the first things you need to understand is the idea of a database. In simple terms a database is like a set of file draws. You can store all the information you need on a subject in the database and then retrieve it.

The analogy doesn’t go quite as far as the reality, though, because you can also run automatic queries – or, in other words, questions- on the information you store in a database that can provide more information for your company.

For example, if you were running a small café shop you might record not only the staff wages and hours, but also the staff lunches and training you do for staff. By running a query you can find out not only the salary cost of a particular employee but also the actual cost of employing them. This is new information derived from other information that your company already stores.

Database: An organised collection of information that your company holds about a subject

Query: A question that your company wants to answer by accessing the information in a database.

Obviously as you use LibreOffice you’ll learn more about these concepts but for now that’s a good enough start!

Tutorial: Your First Database.

In this tutorial we’re going to create a simple staff database. It’s not going to be particularly useful, but we’re going to record:

Employee Number

Staff name

Telephone Number

Address

The Database Wizard

When you open up LibreOffice Base by clicking on the tile in the windows start page it will take you immediately to the Database Wizard:

Note that there are three options on this screen:

We’re going to use this option first. When you’re using LibreOffice Base as a standalone desktop app you only need to create an embedded database. If you want to use a database like MySQL you’d connected to an existing database.

This option allows you to open a database that you’ve already created.

This option allows you to connect to a database in another application. It effectively makes LibreOffice Base a client of the other database. That’s quite a complex concept so don’t worry if you don’t understand what it means – I’ll explain it later on!

For this tutorial since we’re creating a database from scratch the default option to create a new embedded database is perfectly fine. You can click on .

Registering the Database

You’ll see a new page in the Database Wizard called . This screen looks more intimidating than it is.

The first set of options deals with registering the database:

When you register a database it allows LibreOffice to access (in other words use) the Database. So, in this case you definitely want to register the database automatically.

So, why wouldn’t you want to register the database? Perhaps you are an advanced user and you want to set some of the options manually to increase performance.

In reality when making an embedded database you’ll almost always go for the first option.

Opening the Database

The next option is fairly self-explanatory. Do you want to open the database for editing after it’s been saved? I’d suggest that you do, so leave the check box ticked:

Editing the Database Tables with the Table editor

Next is the following text box: .

Tables are quite an important concept in any database. They’re the way that the computer stores information. While it’s possible to create the tables without the table wizard it can simplify matters quite considerably if you use it.

So, for this tutorial I suggest that you check this box:

Java

Sometimes people start to experience problems with LibreOffice Base wizards if they don’t have a recent version of Java installed. While your computer probably does already have Java installed if you experience problems with LibreOffice saying that Java is not installed properly while running any of the wizards or database features you can install Java manually by following the instructions at https://www.java.com/en/download/help/windows_manual_download.xml

Saving the Database

When you’re happy with the options you’ve