But, hopefully this will save someone some significant googling and reading! A lot of the documentation, such as for the package ODB assumed you'd create the database in R itself (which is actually pretty cool, but would be the subject of some other discussion - as I normally use SQLite in those cases). This was remarkably difficult to research. This is all possible with the ODB package in R: ODB.pdf () So huge shoutout to the great work of Sylvain Mareschal. You have a ton of great data hopefully in your Base databases, and now we need to understand that data! Yes you CAN reinvent a ton of wheels in both, but why when you have R? Or python or julia or whatever your preferred poison is! Mine is R. While Base and Calc are powerful tools that can be easily integrated - they are not statistical platforms. It is a wonderful tool and should be part of everyone's workflow if they're working in business data using LibreOffice. Having data in Base - especially large amounts of data that is linked together - is always better than having it in spreadsheets. Which is most of my department, and so I'm assuming other people face this too. Base is an absolutely wonderful alternative to Access, and is also friendly for those who are afraid of coding or have no experience in it. This is absolutely a policy problem, but policy does impact a lot of people. However, in my job we use Access a lot - why? Because many times we have such strict data controls from clients - and resource limitations from IT - that the only database we can use is going to be something local. There are MANY great database systems out there. This weekend I set myself the task of learning how to connect to a pre-existing database made in Base to R. I started with StarOffice back in high school (MANY years ago) when Sun Microsystems donated a large amount of hardware to our computer science department. It's been a challenge because everyone in my department at work uses Excel, but I have been able to do some really cool things with it! That being said, I also enjoy using LibreOffice. I have started using R as my daily driver at work for about four years now and have gotten significantly better at using it over this time after coming from an SPSS background.
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