Open Legacy and Access file with OpenOffice.org

Legacy's family file (".fdb") is an Access (".mdb") file and the first thing to do is to copy (NB. Always work on a copy) the file to a convenient place, say, My Documents and manually rename it from ".fdb" to ".mdb". You will see a warning about changing a file name but just ignore this.

Connect to Open Office

To start the process of opening the file in Open Office, right click on the Open Office Logo on the task bar and select "Database". The screen shown on the right will appear then click the radio button "Connect to an existing database" and "Microsoft Access" from the drop down menu.

Click Select "Next".

On the next screen browse to where you have put the now ".mdb" file and click the "Finish" button.

You will be asked to select a name for the file and it will have the extension ".odb" (I have used "Casual"). Click "Save" and the database will open.

The icons on the left of the screen are self explanatory and clicking on each will take you to that section. At present we just want to look at the files so click on "Tables" and we will see a list of the tables contained in the database. Double clicking any of the table names will open that table for inspection (and editing).

Query Screen

For the puposes of this article, one other function is of interest. The above screenshot shows the screen produced by Query>Use Wizard to Create Query.

Highlighting a column name on the left and then using the arrow to transfer it to the box on the right selects the fields to show and subsequent screens enable multiple sorts, searches and grouping.

Caution

It is not recommended that changes are made using Open Office and then copied back into a ".fdb" file for use in Legacy as at this stage the outcome is very uncertain.

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