Create new tables and forms using LibreOffice: !(ugly_form.png 'Super ugly example form') Any time you save, all edits will occur on the SQLite file. This is fine-it's not actually saving the database, just the accompanying form data. Click on 'Finish.' LibreOffice will prompt you to save an `.odf` database. If you click on 'Browse…', you should see the name of the SQLite database you set up as a DSN earlier.

Click next to select which ODBC database to load. In the wizard, select 'Connect to an existing database' and choose 'ODBC': !(base_wizard.png 'LibreOffice Base wizard') 8. Open LibreOffice and create a new Base database. The SQLite file is now accessible in any program that uses ODBC. Create a new key named 'database' and use the full absolute path to the SQLite database file as the value: !(dsn_setup.png 'DSN setup dialog') 6. Add a new driver using these settings: !(driver_setup.png 'Driver setup dialog') 5. There are two that work equally well: () and (). Prior to OS X 10.5, Apple included one of these, but for whatever reason they stopped with Snow Leopard. The page includes a link to a precompiled version ( currently it says “Steve Palm kindly provided a build of version 0.9993 for MacOSX 10. Download the SQLite ODBC driver for OS X.Add some tables to it, or don’t-it doesn’t matter. Create a new SQLite database using sqlite3 in Terminal (or even easier, use a GUI program).

There are official instructions for doing this on Linux and Windows, but there’s nothing about doing it in OS X. The solutionįortunately there’s a way to use an SQLite database as the backend for LibreOffice Base using an ODBC driver, giving the best of both worlds: an open, universal, Java-free database behind a customizable form-based GUI. LibreOffice Base has excellent support for database-backed forms, but under the hood, LibreOffice uses the Java-based HSQLDB, which does not have native R and Python support and requires older Java runtime environments.

I could use Python to program my own GUI (or even get fancy and learn Swift and make a native Cocoa app), but that seems like an excessive amount of work.

There are plenty of SQLite viewers, but I haven’t found any that let you create Access-like forms. 1 Technically RSQLite is a separate package, but it’s a dependency of dplyr, which is as important as base R in my book.

Libreoffice open access database