"My friend Milt recently told me that he was having problems getting MySQL and OpenOffice.org 1.0 to play together nicely. Actually, 'having problems' is something of an understatement.
"Milt is not a newbie. He's been using personal computers since before IBM's entry in the market. He does his own networking. Through the years, he has made DOS and various flavors of Windows do everything but make coffee. But when it came to getting MySQL and OpenOffice connected with Linux (running SuSE), he was getting nowhere fast.
"I started looking around for resources on the Internet that might ease his pain. I found a wonderful 'how-to' piece called 'OpenOffice.org 1.0, ODBC and MySQL,' by John McCreesh. In the introduction, McCreesh writes about OpenOffice.org 1.0's 'best kept secret'--that secret being the fact that hidden away inside, completely unknown to most OpenOffice users, is a user-friendly front end for databases that is 'a Microsoft Access (and more) equivalent.' That may be so, but there is a very good reason why it's a secret: it's too damn hard getting OpenOffice and ODBC wired up correctly..."
