Open Office Experts! Please help me preserve hyperlinks in a database report

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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If this is in the wrong forum, then please accept my apologies.

I’ve got an Open Office issue I can’t seem to resolve and hope y’all can help me with. I am working with a spreadsheet I created that has many, many fields. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but what I’m attempting to do is to print out a report of only selected fields. I know how to create the report in Base and tie in the spreadsheet from Calc. The report I’m generating is a list of addresses. But here’s my problem. One of the fields in my spreadsheet is hyperlinks. And I need for the hyperlinks to be in the report, too. The hyperlinks go to the addresses on Google maps. I can’t get the report to show the addresses as hyperlinks, though. It just prints them in the report as plain text.

I’ve spend most of the day researching this in OO manuals and also online, but I can’t find the answer. It’s so frustrating!

Does anyone know what I can do to preserve the hyperlinks in my report? Is this a problem from pulling up the spreadsheet in Base? Should I try to save the spreadsheet as a Base file first (and how do I do this?) Is there some formatting code I could use in creating the report? Any (and I do mean ANY!) help you can give me would be really appreciated! I’ve been banging my head against the wall over this for so long I fear I’m knocking a hole in the wall. I hope this turns out to be some simple answer that I should have known all along that will make me go :smack:

Thanks, y’all!

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You probably need to ensure that the output format is HTML or similar - if the report is targeted for printing (i.e plain text), it will not create hyperlinks.

I’ve just looked at LibreOffice (the OpenOffice fork which is getting more attention currently). They have the Report Wizard which seems pretty limited, and an extention Report Builder that produces output to an OpenDocument file (ie a Writer document). This may do what you want.

Si

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Hi, Si. Thanks so much for helping! I have the report builder extension, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to force the output of that one particular field to be a hyperlink in the executed report like you suggested. I’ve spent the better part of a month (really!) trying to figure this out, but I can’t make it work. It SHOULD work, but it doesn’t. I’ve tried Open Office and Act! (a database program.) Both of these programs create reports with characters in the field, but as text, not as a clickable hyperlink (and I’m not trying to print PAPER reports, before someone calls me an idiot, lol.) I’m trying to create reports that will go on the internet or through email and contain those clickable links. I’ve just got to have clickable hyperlinks in that field. The links are clickable in the spreadsheet, but I can’t seem to find a way to get them to be clickable in the actual report. I’m really desperate to find a way for this to work! What am I missing or doing wrong?