Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Tell me it's not true

On 29/02/2012, Dan Lewis <elderdanlewis@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-02-29 at 10:01 -0500, drew jensen wrote:
> > On Wed, 2012-02-29 at 13:36 +0000, e-letter wrote:
> > > On 29/02/2012, Andreas Säger <villeroy@t-online.de> wrote:
> > > > Almost nothing has changed since then, except for fixing things that
> > > > should have been working right from the start 9 years ago.
> > > > The Base developers wasted too much time with useless wizards covering
> > > > no more than 30% of the program's capabilities and with a "self
> > > > contained database" document that is a caricature of a database
> > > > (unsafe,
> > > > unsecure, low featured and slow).
> > > > Base is best when you ignore most of its tools and helpers relying
> > > > entirely on your own skills and on the capabilities of the underlying
> > > > database driver.
> > >
> > > Interesting; suggests that base exists just to answer the question by
> > > m$ fans: "where is the equivalent to acce$$?
> >
> > well, think what you want...though I will say this - one of the root
> > causes of Base's woes can be tied IMO to the first sentence in the
> > original design specification, to paraphrase from it "...because users
> > are too stupid to.....".
> >
> > Starting from the premise that users are stupid it is not surprising
> > that Base ended up the way it did.
> >
> > xoxo,
> >
> > //drew
>
>      This thread for the most part is exactly what should not be part of
> this mailing list. The attitudes are horrible with very little said in a
> positive way. Yes, why have Base? Why have a Base Guide? The person who
> wrote a suggested outline for the Base Guide is among this group. With
> this attitude, how could the outline be what it should be? Does it
> suffer the same attitude problem? Besides, what purpose would it serve
> given the comments about Base?

These are fundamentally important questions to ask. You cannot realise
new paradigms/opportunities/etc. unless problems are looked at
differently.

>      What would most people who are new to Base think after reading the
> negative comments about Base? Statements about how hard it is to learn
> (comparing learning at least some of it to the difficulty of learning a
> new language). No one seems to be able to give references that would
> help. (No one has so far.)

In previous other posts, there have been references to good OO
tutorial documents about base.

>      Recently there was a long thread that began with a problem with a
> large spreadsheet. One of the early comments was that the data should
> have been in a database. Now, it appears that that comment should have
> been: you should be using a database but don't use Base. Strange very
> little help was give as to how Calc could be used. So, it sounds like to
> me that the advice seems to be: limit your use of Calc and DON'T USE
> Base.

What is wrong with telling someone not to use base??? The purpose of
free software is freedom to use other tools; noone said it had to be a
traditional office software product. I remember being advised by OO
users to use R for statistics; it was the appropriate advice at the
time.

>      OK, I have had my say. I will likely delete any replies that come
> from this thread because I have seen people justify their actions in the
> past threads. This is suppose to be a list to help others, and their
> comments are not likely to do that. Besides, any replies to me need to
> consist of references for getting the most from Base. Other than help in
> learning more about how to use it, I don't need.

Your loss...

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