compatibility with Microsoft Access

[Wiebe_van_der_Worp]

You're right, and it is hard to pick the right words these days. I tried to keep it simple and avoid disks space but I meant to say the same. Model T100 is having 2 GB RAM and 32GB data storage (soldered on the board!). That, plus knowing Asus (et al) is putting a lot of crapware on board was the reason to give the advice to get rid of it. Running msconfig is always a nightmare with brands like Asus, Acer,...

[James_Knott]

Running misconfig...???

[Tom_Davies1]

Hi
32Gb hard-drive is probably bearable in Windows. It really means
keeping everything possible off the hard-drive so the Cloud,
usb-sticks and external drives do become vital and each has
advantages. You are not going to be able to store many movies but
normal documents, photos and things like those should be fine.
Regards from
Tom

[Tom_Davies1]

Hi
Yes and no. Mostly Yes.

I've always found that Windows slows down when the hard-drive is over
20% full. Then another minor drop in speed after around 50% full.
Then over 80% full makes it almost unusable. There are plenty of
other factors so the percentage of hard-drive filled up only gets
really noticeably painful at the 80% full mark.

So i guess i 80% agree with Brian there.

Weirdly the specs page
http://www.asus.com/us/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/ASUS_Transformer_Book_T100TA/specifications/
says "Storage 64Gb eMMc, 32Gb eMMc with 500Gb hard-drive" which is the
typically cryptic set of figures we all get used to in the IT
industry, especially in Sales where they want to mystify us.

500Gb sounds like a lot and it's pretty standard for a shop-bought
machine these days but it's quite pitiful now that 6Tb drives are
available. If you buy a storage drive these days the sweet-spot for
£/space is around 3-4Tb but i was recently reading that 3Tb drives
have been disappointingly short-lived (although mine seems mostly fine
still). 500Gb is plenty for a working machine but it'll only hold
around 20-50 movies so try not to have tooo many stored! You'll
probably 'need' a few though.

I'm guessing the eMMc figures mean Ram but as Brian pointed out that
is nothing to do with "storage". It's got more to do with speed but
it's not really a clear-cut relationship. It's more to do with how
many things you can have open at the same time as each other and how
responsive they can be as you switch between them. 32Gb is likely to
be tolerable but 64Gb kinda future-proofs it a bit.

Windows always needs "shed loads" more than a Linux or Mac. These
days my Linux machine has around 2Gb and i generally have a movie and
a game and tons of tabs open in my web-browser along with whatever i
am working on. My works machine has 1Gb but then i don't watch movies
or play games at work. Just a few YouTube things for research and
sometimes Facebook to dip into at odd moments briefly.

Regards from
Tom

[Tom_Davies1]

Hi again
Blimey!!! I have just seen that if you want Access in one of the
proper MS Office bundles then you would have to get "MS Office
Professional" at around £390, nearly £400!!
http://products.office.com/en-GB/buy/compare-microsoft-office-products

The other MS Office 365 bundles, "Home" and "Personal", do have Access
and allow you to pay monthly (although that works out as more
expensive in the long run). Note the "Home and Student" bundle is for
2013 (sop it only gets 15Gb Online storage) instead of 365 and the
link i just gave conveniently misses out the MS "Office 365
University" bundle.

Regards from
Tom

[Tom_Davies1]

Hi
Yeh, i had a feeling it wouldn't include Access!! I was just digging
around on the microsoft.com website but it's extremely difficult to
find out what is in each different bundle on there.

I did find that MS "Office 365 University" DOES have Access but i'm
not sure if it's the full version or if it's just some sort of
read-only version. 365 is the web-apps version of MS Office;
http://products.office.com/en-GB/university

Whatever version of MS Office is included on any new machine these
days is likely to be trialware (more like ransomware) that only works
for about 30 days and may have restricted functionality. So it'll
suddenly demand payment when you use it and those demands will get
more insistent as the time-limit gets closer. I'm not sure if it is
automatic actually nor when it's demands start (assume they do). It's
possible that the pre-installed MS Office just suddenly stops woirking
or something like that but i'm fairly sure they do have a pop-up bag
box. I'm not sure how to convince it that you have installed a
different version of MS Office. In "the good old days" (they weren't
really that good tho ) a new machine would have a full version of
MS Office. Times change though.

Advantages of 365 over regular MS Office 213. apart from actually
having Access, include £60 for a 4 year license rather than £109 for
forever. Err, is that an advantage? I guess it is because in about 4
years there will be the next version to upgrade to, ie to buy/rent.

Also allows you to install on up to 4-5 devices/machines such as
desktops, laptops, notebooks, netbooks, tablets, phones (errr Windows
phone is a tad sub-optimal compared to Android as it tends to suffer
the usual Windows problems such as slowdowns after 6months). With
other versions of MS Office the license key can only be used on a new
machine when you phone up MS and tell them you are removing it from
your previous machine. Corporate users sometimes get to install it at
home as well as at work but that's seldom known about and impractical
(try getting your IT department to give you the key for MS Office and
you'll see what i mean).

Biggest advantage with 365 is that you get 1Tb (=1024 Gb in theory but
possibly more likely to be around 800-900Gb = still masses of space)
'free' Cloud storage on the MS "OneDrive" (which is apparently hosted
on Linux servers btw! Jic you were interested. Strangely strange
right?). The regular version of MS Office 2013 gives you 15Gb. So it
is really good for students who may have to use many different systems
and possibly include a lot of travel.

This online storage space reduces the need for external storage but it
takes time to upload/download stuff so it's probably best to sync the
main machine (the notebook) with the Cloud for most stuff and then
just download (or view online)/upload only when it's a small number of
files.

Of course the biggest problem is compatibility with whatever version
of MS Office the teacher/lecturer is using. If he/she is using MS
Office 2010 or 2007 then it might be better to buy the same version
and try to find the right bundle to make sure you do get Access.
However it is quite likely that at least 1 student is likely to have
2013 or 365 and that might prompt the teacher/lecturer to upgrade to
one of the those 2 newer versions.

If they are using a more recent version of MS Office than you then
they will probably use features that wont work on an older version of
MS Office and some files might not work at all or more likely just
look a bit odd. If you are using a more recent version of MS Office
than the teacher/lecturer then you just have to avoid using some of
the latest fancy features otherwise they may have trouble coping with
your files. Even so files on older versions of MS Office don't always
work in newer versions of it.

This slight incompatibility between the various different versions of
MS Office 2007, 2010, 2013 and 365) is a complete 'accident' (honest
guv) that just happens to kinda force people to keep buying the newer
versions in order to keep doing whatever you were doing with the older
version quite happily - and then buy whichever version most of the
people you deal with are using - and then find you can only have 1
version of MS Office on a machine at a time (unless you figure out how
to force it (and even then Sharepoint and Outlook tend to get a bit
messed-up)). Still MS are a bit "down on their luck" lately and need
all the money they can trick people out of in order to keep their
shareholders happy.

Personally i am hugely relieved that i don't have to worry about all
that complexity any more! LibreOffice doesn't have any of that
nonsense going on.

At worst some files done using newer branch's newer functionality will
just not show that bit that relies on the new stuff but the rest of
the file would be the same with just a bit of "re-flowing" to adapt
for differerences between set-ups and printers.

It is a bit of a headache trying to keep track of the different MS
Office bundles for different versions and how much they cost and what
you get compared against what you need.

Quite frankly though Base does not have the resources to be a suitable
replacement for Access in this sort of scenario. Even though it is
more advanced in so many ways it doesn't have quite enough devs
maintaining it so it can be a bit quirky and unpredictable.

However there are other database programs such as MySql/MariaDb that
is an industry standard for web-hosting companies and websites and
Postgresql that is quite widely used for other types of Servers. Base
can be quite a good (although still quirky) front-end for them to
upgrade from their built-in default front-ends.

I can understand why the teacher/lecturer uses Access even though it
is irksome. Most desktop machines have it already or can get it
fairly easily. It's pretty much free to people such as
teachers/lecturer and they probably don't even realise that it is not
free to everyone. It wouldn't occur to them that the main reason you
have had to buy a machine for £200-300 is purely to be able to use
Access. If you mention it to them, or to other parents, they will
probably say you would have had to buy such a machine anyway.

Regards from
Tom

[Tom_Davies1]

Hi
Urmas' last few posts have been really useful so it's not really fair
to say he/she is always a pain. That last post was the first outbreak
of trollishness for many months.
Regards from
Tom

[Jaroslaw_Staniek]

[..]

Hi,
While I sympathize with the sentiment, there are some points to be
reminded. Disclaimer: I am maintainer of Kexi and lib Predicate.

- There's no single SQL standard to which software agrees to align, no
level of compliance; most of the reasons are related to
legacy/historical decision, performance

- There's no official subset of SQL (as in C98 in programming for
example) of SQL that everyone tries to align to; aligning to a subset
is accidental or a result of a common sense

- For many reasons we're all using proprietary formats (does not mean
closed) for SQL language and db storage. LO Base uses HSQL with Java
by default (so HSQL's SQL), Kexi uses SQLite (so SQLite's SQL). Both
apps define own metadata on top of the database, e.g. Kexi has a XML
markup for meta-data and meta-data tables, origins of whom are in use
of SQLite 2.8. So also SQLite's SQL is used ther. All this not
standardized.

- The above influences type definitions, quite fundamental thing. Then
even character encoding in strings is influenced.

- LO Base uses (and exposes to the user) whatever SQL dialect the
backend uses; for the record Kexi has own dialect of SQL (KexiSQL)
that it internally translates to backend's dialect at the very end;
this is a behavior being a superset of that ODBC wanted to be, BTW,
even while going this way is costly in terms of development, which is
the cost of keeping sane control over the format; in case of Base when
MySQL decides to deviate from the past SQL bits (for whatever reason),
Base's "format" will be certainly affected

- There's neither a "database storage" part in the ODF specs nor the
mention of what SQL shall be used; I was involved in fixing the
connection in ODF, and that's all what we have (last I checked)

- Programming/scripting layer is super-important for desktop database
tools such as LO Base or Kexi; there's no mention of programming
language in ODF; everything is implementation-defined, at least as in
MSOOXML

- Speaking of programming, LO Base inherits from product decisions of
StarOffice so uses StarBasic to mimic the VB/VBA language, object
model and run-time, I can understand users asking for compatibility
even if just because of that.

So things are not really white-black to me. There was a room for
coordination in, say, 2004 what I inefficiently proposed to then - the
OpenOffice guys led by Sun. No result, Base was started based on Sun's
technology[1] and the tradition of copying many of MS Office design
decisions.

So for me, no surprise users are looking at "compatibility".

PS: How we can improve? Pick small areas and define standards. For
example CSV import/export specification description format. We can do
that and more!

[1] So deeply that they decided to use Java backend and put a db file
in a ZIP container risking breaking ACID principles known for years,
and removing typical efficiency of databases (in-place writes).

[Tom_Davies1]

Hi
+1
(err = "I agree")

Just under half of that is what i tried to say in simpler English.
Being more precise sometimes makes it even more difficult to
understand but does need to be done at some point for greater
understanding. So, thanks for that!

Some of the rest is 'just' extra detail about why, or in what ways,
Access is incompatible with Base.

I think most of the parts i didn't quite understand did the same thing.

I liked getting some confirmation that Base is better when using an
external back-end. The internal zipped java back-end has serious
flaws but not just due to age and lack of updates. The devs are
moving to a newer internal back-end.

However Csv is not standardised either! Grrr. Often each
implementation seems to have some different interpretation fo the
basic idea. Csv = Comma separated values so it sounds like it should
be about as simple as it could possibly get. Sadly it hasn't worked
out that way. Some say that Tsv (tabs separated values) is more
standardised but i'm guessing it would be quite possible for people to
develop their own differences even in that if Tsv became more widely
used.

Proprietary does mean closed but it's difficult to find a more
suitable word. I think we can understand the word in context as being
something like "that each implementation is often different from other
implementations and that it might not be possible to figure out how
some implementations do things". So the word proprietary does nearly
fit and certainly makes it a LOT shorter!

Regards from
Tom