For the record, I have OpenOffice a fair shake, trying to use it for our wedding guest list. Had I known going into it that I’d be unable, in any way, to export the data into flat text, I never would have tried. That’s right, 1 year after launching OpenOffice base, the simple task of getting access to that data from any other application, in any other way, is still impossible. 😦

This morning, as we were trying to correlate our wedding gifts with the guest list, I gave up, created a report that made a 17 page text file, and built a Perl filter to turn that into a tab separated file. Now the entire list is in Gnumeric, easy to edit, and share between Susan and I.

Dear OpenOffice,

Please actually provide open access to your data when creating a new product. A move like this with OpenOffice Base is almost as bad as MS would do.