Base drop down menu lacks Access

[angkor]

Hi, I have MS Access files I want to open. My operating system is Ubuntu 8.4. I no longer have Windows XP. When I open OpenOffice Base the Database has the option of connect to an existing database. The problem is that when I click on the drop down menu there is no Access listed. There is jdbc, mysql, Oracle jdbc, dBase, Adabas D, spreadsheet, text, evolution local, ODBC, evolution ldap, groupwise, and postgresql. How can I get access on that drop down menu?

Any help is appreciated.

[Villeroy]

We can be fairly shure that Microsoft will never publish a driver to access it's JET/DAO/ADO/Whatever under any operating system other than their own one. We can access Access databases with many software tools, including OOo, under the Windows operating system with a freely downloadable data-access package by Microsoft.
There used to be a reverse-engineered free Linux-driver which was able to provide for read-only access at least, but this is no longer availlable. As far as I know, there have been reports about data loss.

[angkor]

Thank you Villeroy. The reason I posted was because I saw previous posts explaining how to open Access databases. You open the OpenOffice Database Wizard. One option is to connect to an existing database. Other posts have indicated that the drop down menu here includes MSAccess. You select this and you are able to open Access databases. My drop down menu, however, does not include Access. My question is, why not? How can I add MS Access to the list of database types that I can connect to?

[Villeroy]

You are running Linux. There is no Linux-driver to access Access. Ubuntu has a package "mdbtools" in it's repositories. It's a set of command line tools to dump contents into text files or something. But mdbtools does not provide connections between applications and mdb files.

Code: Select all

$ sudo apt-get install mdbtools

Code: Select all

$ ls /usr/bin/mdb*

/usr/bin/mdb-array    /usr/bin/mdb-parsecsv  /usr/bin/mdb-tables
/usr/bin/mdb-export   /usr/bin/mdb-prop      /usr/bin/mdb-ver
/usr/bin/mdb-header   /usr/bin/mdb-schema
/usr/bin/mdb-hexdump  /usr/bin/mdb-sql

untitled(January 31, 2006) untitled(January 31, 2006)

NAME
mdb-export - Export data in an MDB database table to CSV format.

SYNOPSIS
mdb-export [-H] [-d <delimiter>] [-R <row delim>] [[-Q] || [-q <quote> [-X <escape>]]] [-I] [-D <format>] [-S] <database> <table>

DESCRIPTION
mdb-export is a utility program distributed with MDB Tools.

It produces a CSV (comma separated value) output for the given table.
Such output is suitable for importation into databases or spreadsheets.

OPTIONS
-H Supress header row

-Q Don’t wrap text-like fields (text, memo, date) in quotes. If
not specified text fiels will be surrounded by " (double quote)
characters.

-d Specify an alternative column delimiter If no delimiter is spec‐
ified, table names will be delimited by a , (comma) character.

-R Specify a row delimiter

-I INSERT statements (instead of CSV)

-D Set the date format (see strftime(3) for details)

-S Sanitize names (replace spaces etc. with underscore)

-q Use to wrap text-like fields. Default is ".

-X Use to escape quoted characters within a field. Default is dou‐
bling.

NOTES
HISTORY
mdb-export first appeared in MDB Tools 0.1

AUTHORS
The mdb-export utility was written by Brian Bruns

BUGS
Memo fields are allowed to contain a newline characters, the current
program does nothing about this.

untitled(January 31, 2006)
~
Manual page mdb-export(1) line 1/55 (END)

The other man pages look promising as well, but nothing will connect your Base document nor any other database frontend with access files.

[angkor]

Thanks for your guidance. I am trying to get mdbtools to work. I need to configure two packages, but I am making progress. I was able to read a database created in MS Access using the application mdbviewer. I was unable to open forms or reports only view tables but the viewer did not open all entries in the table. I am sure there were over 3000 entries but I could only view 1000. Is there anything else I can do to get the entire database to open?

Thanks in advance.

[Villeroy]

If you can not handle command-line tools to extract the database: Get a Windows box with Access or the data access tools at least.
If there is Access, use it's self-reporting tool to create a report about tables, relations and other features you may want to recreate in some other system. Then export the table contents to csv, spreadsheet, dBase or whatever Access offers.
If there is no Access, use some other tool, such as OOo Base or MS Excel, to connect with the mdb. Dump into a directory of plain text tables (csv) or import the database into a spreadsheet application (a "normal" spreadsheet takes 65536 rows).

OOo on USB stick for Windows: http://portableapps.com/apps/office/openoffice_portable