Locking Individual Fields From Manual Input?

[Blitzer303]

Hi,

I'm very new to OpenOffice and had been for sometime intending to get MS Office 2007 at some point. However once I heard about OpenOffice I thought it sounded like a very viable alternative.

Anyway, to get to the point...

I've been playing around with Base with a view to perhaps using it as a replacement for MS Works that I use at work for various databases. I've got to admit that although I regard myself as resonably clued up when it comes to computers that this relational database stuff is leaving me rather confused to say the least, and I'm actually finding it quite difficult to reproduce what was a pretty straight forward database in works.

It's mainly simple things I'm trying to do at the moment and although I'm sure it's my own lack of understanding of Base I am finding it quite hard going as nothing seems to be quite as intuitive as I would imagine.

First little problem - How to make certain fields within the database as read only? I did manage to find out how to do this the other day but I'm stumped if I can remember how now or find any info on how to do it as much as I try. The database is going to be a manufacturing schedule for a small engineering company I work for, and I'm trying to use one Auto-Incremental field (also the key field) as the works order number. Naturally this field needs to read-only and it should not be possible to edit the data it holds.

I'm also rather lost by the concept of what or rather how the Tables, Forms, Queries and Reports are intended to be used once the database has been created. I guess I must be missing something, but I'm not exactly finding this basic info.

Enough of me rambling - if anyone can point me in the right direction it would be very much appreciated. many thanks in advance for any replies.