Open Office Base for Taxes!

With only 15 odd days left before taxes are due, I think I’ll try something a little risky in the spirit of learning. I will be creating a database using Open Office Base to manage my books. With my business, things just got a whole lot more complicated, and I need something to track the flow of money.

You may ask: Why not just use one of the dozens of business programs out there (e.g. MYOB, Simply Accounting, etc..). Answer: I’m a computing scientist, not an accountant.

I actually have Simply Accounting, but got frustrated because it seemed way too complicated. I figure all I need is a simple database to track my income and expenses, and categorize it into the prescribed tax categories.

My ulterior motive is to get a little dirty with Open Office to see if it is a good as I think it is. If I am to find a slick way of integrating Dataface with Open Office, I must first get good at just using Open Office..

What do you think… is this foolish?

SnapZ Pro X as close to Mac Spyware as you can get

A while back I installed a program called SnapZ Pro X – an application for OS X that allows you to do better screenshots than the built-in OS X ones – you can do movies and stuff too.. Worked OK, but the movies didn’t turn out all that well so I decided not to register it.

The problem is that it overrides the OS X screen shot ability so I can’t take screen shots anymore unless I get rid of it – and now the demo is expired and all of my screenshots end up with watermarks on them. So i try first to run the uninstaller that came with it.. But it gives me an error message saying that an error occurred and that I should contact SnapZ Pro support… It seems to me that this is probably intentional and they are just trying to develop leads… very shady…

I have searched my hard drive for anything with SnapZ in the name, and have removed everything that I could find… but this thing is still there.. somewhere… aghhh!

Be warned! Do not use SnapZ Pro X!

Dataface to Open Office: You complete me

I just ran across the latest release of Open Office.org (version 2.2.) which includes the holy grail of database development: Base. This version contains a built-in database that moves into the realm of filemaker for ease of use. It allows power users to develop tables, views, queries, forms, and reports inside of OpenOffice. What’s more, once you have registered the database, you can use it in the other parts of open office (like Writer and Calc). This is the way it ought to be.

It now looks like Open Office is a perfect development environment for DBAs that need to unroll database solutions for clients. It is available on just about every OS under the sun so there are no compatibility issues. All of the databases are stored in the Open Document format – so a database can be shared and copied.

What really interests me, however, is the fact that these great tools can work with existing SQL databases like MySQL with minimal hassle. That, and the fact that the DBs are stored in an open format.

Here’s the idea: Dataface can create .odb files (the database file format for Open Office) on the fly that will allow users to interact with the database application using the quick and easy Open Office interface. For some things, a web interface is just too clunky. I’m not sure how deep this rabbit hole goes, but I intend to explore it to its limits to see just how much Dataface can be integrated with Open Office.