{"id":204,"date":"2009-07-22T18:33:03","date_gmt":"2009-07-22T22:33:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=204"},"modified":"2009-07-22T20:31:37","modified_gmt":"2009-07-23T00:31:37","slug":"hurrah-for-alex-nolan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2009\/07\/22\/hurrah-for-alex-nolan\/","title":{"rendered":"Hurrah for Alex Nolan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve had a bunch of Microsoft Access database files kicking around for the last several months, but due to version incompatibilities, I&#8217;ve been unable to open them. I didn&#8217;t want to buy a license for the program, just to pull my data out, so I&#8217;d looked for alternative ways to free my data from the proprietary clutches of Access.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d tried using Open Office, which includes a database program, but ran into the consequences of my own bad planning: Base (the OOo database component) could open Access files, but couldn&#8217;t do anything useful with them if they didn&#8217;t have a primary key. Most of my files were pretty basic flat files with a single table, so I&#8217;d never bothered to add a primary key (yes, I know: bad database practice).<\/p>\n<p>Base would also let me export individual tables or queries to Calc (the spreadsheet component), but the process seemed pretty dicey &mdash; it locked up on me three times as I tried to save a new Calc spreadsheet as a .CSV file. I wasn&#8217;t comfortable that all the data in the table had been properly captured in the output, either.<\/p>\n<p>Enter Mr. Nolan&#8217;s neat little <em>MDB Viewer Plus<\/em> utility (downloadable from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alexnolan.net\/software\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>). It&#8217;s just a simple viewer for Microsoft Access files, but it worked a treat on extracting the tables I needed out of the proprietary MDB format to a .CSV I can import into something else (after this experience, something open source by preference).<\/p>\n<p><b>Update<\/b>: Aagh! Not quite as clean as I first thought. It appears that any date that has a value of greater than 12 for the day has been dropped. I wonder if this is an artifact of the difference between British and American usage (D\/M\/Y versus M\/D\/Y). Data normalization looks to be a lengthy task after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve had a bunch of Microsoft Access database files kicking around for the last several months, but due to version incompatibilities, I&#8217;ve been unable to open them. I didn&#8217;t want to buy a license for the program, just to pull my data out, so I&#8217;d looked for alternative ways to free my data from the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[94,93,92],"class_list":["post-204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-microsoft","tag-opensource","tag-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3i","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":207,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions\/207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}