Yet Another Useful Feature from OpenOffice.org

Awhile back a labmate told me that he was considering using Ubuntu on his laptop. I of course was thrilled at the prospect and only with tremendous difficulty suppressed expression of incredible delight so as to answer his questions more objectively. He asked what I did for word processing in place of Microsoft Office, and I told him that I used OpenOffice.org. When he asked how I made do with it, I realized that not only did I know OpenOffice.org, belovedly known as OOo, better than I did MS Office, but that I had "gotten away" with OOo for a full-on ten years. OOo my goodness--a decade.

Today I realized yet another reason why OOo is so special. In addition to its completely open-source (and thus free) code base, multi-platform compatibility, and integration with Zotero and other open-source tools, I learned that I could also use it to connect with Apache Derby database. What, you ask, is that important for? Why, for none other than tXtFL databasing, of course. While I was prepared to write a completely separate graphical tool for managing the finer aspects of the tXtFL football database, it finally dawned on me that any graphical front-end to Derby could do just as well, if not way better. As expected, OOo lived up to its expectation, as I've attempted to document step-by-step here.