Am 10.09.2012 18:56, JAMES MAJESKI wrote:
The following is a reply to my query from a private source: Data bases are for fixed data columns and standardized input methods and require manipulation by sql type query tools. Unless you are getting automatic feeds of significant amounts of data from your world wide operations I don't see what it would do for you. If you are putting together a business then a data base would be a good thing even if it is simple, but those are available pre-canned and some are open source. Unless you are doing something far more complex than I imagine spread sheets should serve you well and spread sheets have reporting capabilities.
You want a standardized input method to generate text files with ISO dates. Unlike its users, a spreadsheet does not care about formatting attributes. The only thing that really counts is the cell value.
Databases are designed to do what most of today's spreadsheet users try so desparately try to do in spreadsheets. Databases are ubiquitous online and offline. Valid CSV files are exported from databases and they are destined to be imported back into other databases. Each row represents a record, each record has the same amount of fields, each field has a distinct data type. A spreadsheet has no records nor fields and the only data types are text, number and boolean (in Calc even the booleans are numbers). There are various ways to load csv into a spreadsheet so you can process the imported data by means of spreadsheet formulas. Simple statistics, projections, what-if-scenarios are the most typical spreadsheet applications based on database data. You pull it into a sheet and let the spreadsheet do what spreadsheets use to do (which is not text editing).
Base is our database component. It is very, very underdeveloped, nevertheless underestimated. Even the worst database tool does a better database job than the best spreadsheet can do.
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