Just installed Open Office 3 and tried to migrate my MS Access DB (.mdb) to open office.

The original .mdb was created with MS Access 97 and then migrated to MS Access 2003.

Open Office (OO) can read the tables only. This DB contains many forms and reports and a lot of VBasic code, none of which are accessible in OO.

I did spent two days on Google about this problem and the result is very negative.

My question now is:

Is there any free or low-cost solution available to migrate MS .mdb's in its entirety to a new program?

opalhort

Just installed Open Office 3 and tried to migrate my MS Access DB (.mdb) to open office.

Is there any free or low-cost solution available to migrate MS .mdb's in its entirety to a new program?

opalhort

Nope. Some routes are easier than others, e. g., PHP-MySQL (see here), but in any case you're looking at custom programming work if you want forms, queries, reports, and scripts.

On of the biggest drawbacks of OO.

Complex databases and spreadsheets are close to impossible to migrate, or at least will involve a lot of manual re-coding...

one of my main reasons for not migrating to ubuntu completely. sadly!

I run MS Office on Ubuntu with the help of Codeweaver Linux Professional... no sweat and as fast as an MS Windows machine........

Just installed Open Office 3 and tried to migrate my MS Access DB (.mdb) to open office.

The original .mdb was created with MS Access 97 and then migrated to MS Access 2003.

Open Office (OO) can read the tables only. This DB contains many forms and reports and a lot of VBasic code, none of which are accessible in OO.

I did spent two days on Google about this problem and the result is very negative.

My question now is:

Is there any free or low-cost solution available to migrate MS .mdb's in its entirety to a new program?

opalhort

All you can really do is to perform an ODBC export of your Access Database(access has built in functionality for this) from Access to Open Office HSQL. This will get your schema and data into Open Office.

Your forms, reports, modules, macros etc...will need to be re coded.

For future application portability, you may wish to consider the following :

1) recode your application in a platform independent manner and language (web based(php, ruby, java etc...) or a Java fat client)

2) design your database logic in your code to abstract the underlying RDMBS(Relational Database Management System) ie: use an O/R (Object Relational) mapping framework such as Hibernate.

You will then have an application that can run on most Operating Systems and you can easily plug n play any RDBMS without any changes to your application.

Thank you very much for all the advise you provided, sadly it confirmed my suspicion.

Manual re-coding and re-design of forms, reports etc. is just too much.

It took me almost a year ('98) to get the original DB up and running and it has been fine tuned along the way ever since.

I'm in no mood to go through this process again.

So I guess I will just have to invest some funds (what is the going rate for the 'real' thing these days?) in order to satisfy a certain group of people should they come knocking at our door un-announced for inspection. (Judging from mails received, we appear to be already on their radar , or at least on their mailing list)

opalhort

Manual re-coding and re-design of forms, reports etc. is just too much.

It took me almost a year ('98) to get the original DB up and running and it has been fine tuned along the way ever since.

I'm in no mood to go through this process again.

If you have a working system now, it is often significantly easier to have someone re-code the work. While it might have been a lot of work for you, if the logic is all well established it may not be too bad for an expert.