[libreoffice-users] Re: Labeling in Calc

Am 22.07.2012 16:19, Tom Davies wrote:
> Hi :)
> That is true.  So why not use the fastest route to get the required result and stick with spreadsheeting for now? 
>  Definitely a good idea to start vaguely thinking about moving to a database program when time&resources 
> permits.  Base is not yet ready for masses and does take some fairly considerable expertise "to get it 
> right".  Set-up is not trivial even if some people find it easy.
> Regards from
> Tom :)
>
>
> --- On Sun, 22/7/12, Andreas Säger <villeroy@t-online.de> wrote:
>
> <snip />
>
> Please ignore Tom. He is very kind but totally ignorant towards LibreOffice Base which can read 
> spreadsheet data as if they were database data.
>
> <snip />

Tom, you will never get it because your engagement is entirely 
idealistic. You do not use LibreOffice more than a beginner.

Enter raw data into a spreadsheet (Excel, Gnumeric, Calc, whatever), a 
text editor, some dBase application, a true database, whatever.
Connect a Base document to the tabular data source and design a report.
The report will read the raw unsorted data and present them in any 
wanted order with any grouping you want. The very same report will 
always reflect the current status of the raw, unfiltered, unsorted data.
Both, the data source and the report may be spreadsheets. A sheet report 
can have some conditional formatting to hide values when they are equal 
to the preceeding value.

All I try to explain over and over again: In any case you should 
strictly separate the raw data storage from calculated, sorted, 
filtered, grouped and formatted output. This is best practice for 
spreadsheets and databases enforce this separation anyway.

As a matter of fact, database forms (even Base forms) provide much 
faster and less error prone ways of data entry. In the last 2 years I 
replaced a dozend of useless spreadsheet lists with simple databases 
because "my users" never really got used to spreadsheet editing 
(navigation, dates, numbers, clear, delete, ...). Spreadsheets are too 
versatile for untrained users. Wrong data yield wrong results. My 
databases collect a thousand of manually entered records per month on a 
local network.


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