HOW TO… Catalogue items in LibreOffice Base
What you need: LibreOffice Base Time required: Two hours or more
While spreadsheets are great for listing data in columns and rows, and they’re easy to search if you want to find a single record, they’re less useful when you need to identify patterns or sets. If you used one to log your DVDs, for example, how long would it take you to extract a list of only those films lasting 100 minutes or less, already sorted with your favourites coming first?
To run a query like that, you really need a database. Here, we’ll show you how to do that with LibreOffice Base. You could achieve the same in Microsoft Access, if you have it, but as it’s not included in the Home edition of Microsoft Office (www.snipca.com/41632), we opted for Base, a free download from www.libreoffice.org.
We’ll explain how to catalogue and search DVDs, but you can apply these instructions for anything you collect or gather information on, such as books, cars, recipes, TV shows or aeroplanes.
1 Create your first database
When you launch LibreOffice Base, the first screen asks if you want to create a new database,
