[juneau-lug] Re: Accessing Windows Office data

  • From: James Zuelow <e5z8652@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: juneau-lug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 6 Apr 2010 06:30:37 -0800

On Monday 05 April 2010, Larry Hurlock wrote:

> 
> Problem: Want to use ACCESS to read the .mdb database files, but don't know
>  how

Access and Publisher are the trickiest of all of the Office applications to 
retrieve data from.  Any of the other programs are relatively easy.

> 
> If I open the 10GB directly through the desktop icon , the message says
>  "could not read /media/317..., no application installed for JET database
>  files" (I believe that JET is the historical name for ACCESS file format)
> 

Correct, Access uses Jet.

Try `sudo apt-get install mdbtools`

After it installs, read everything you can in /usr/share/doc/mdbtools and `man 
mdbtools` to get to learn how to use the program.

That will let you READ the files, and even export them to another format.

> If I go through Applications>.wine>... MSACCESS.exe  to try to either open
>  the .mdb file, or open ACCESS, it says "application must be installed to
>  run, please run SETUP from location where you originally installed the
>  application"
> 
> What would that involve?

Inserting your old MSOFFICE CD, and running the setup.exe through wine.  
Office is typically  very tricky to install with basic wine.  Crossover makes 
a commercial version of wine with more bells & whistles.  You might get better 
luck by purchasing and installing Crossover Linux Standard ($40) -- they 
officially support Office, including Office 2000.  The advantage of doing it 
this way is that you can still use Access to manipulate the mdb files instead 
of just reading them with mdbtools.

> 
> I know there are other options, but I don't want to partition my hard drive
>  with a re-install of Ubuntu.

Once installed, there are very few reasons to actually re-install Ubuntu.

> 
> Is .wine really a good answer to the problem of getting to my old Windows
>  format data?  I have identified /media/317D-1DBE to .wine, so that is not
>  a problem
> 
Wine has it's place.  Usually wine is used for gaming, so the project really 
supports games well.  But the preferable option is to export your data to 
something that will run natively, such as MySQL or PostgreSQL (or even 
OpenOffice Base -- but I've never built a Base application).  The problem with 
Access databases is that there isn't a true Linux equivalent to Access.  
Access makes form design very easy and takes care of a lot of the underlying 
SQL stuff like relationships between tables for you.  With one of the SQL 
databases, you'll design your forms yourself -- I tend to use HTML, and you 
get to build relationships into queries manually.

If you export your data get ready to learn a lot more about what Access was 
doing under the hood. 

James
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