OpenOffice Base makes it incredibly easy to hook up to a MySQL database. Once this is accomplished you can easily create a front end to browse through your data, edit it, report on it, etc. Below are a few steps I took to create a functional setup:

What I did was:

1. Have OpenOffice installed
2. Access to a database (for this example I used my wp_posts table from WordPress) from the workstation running OpenOffice
3. Downloaded MySQL® Connector/J and installed
   1. Within OpenOffice clicked, “Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > Java > Class Path… > Add Archive…”
   2. Selected “mysql-connector-java-5.1.5-bin.jar” or current version
   3. Restarted OpenOffice (had to make sure the process was fully “killed”)
4. Created a new database within OpenOffice
   1. Within OpenOffice, clicked “File > New > Database”
   2. clicked the “Connect to an existing database” radio button
   3. selected “MySQL” from the drop down list
   4. clicked the “Next >>” button
   5. selected the “Connect using JDBC (Java Database Connectivity)” radio button
   6. clicked the “Next >>” button
   7. entered the “Name of the database” into the text field
   8. entered the MySQL “Server URL” into the text field
   9. clicked the “Test Class” button and received “The JDBC driver was loaded successfully”
   10. clicked the “Next >>” button
   11. entered as “User name” into the text field
   12. checked the “Password required” checkbox
   13. clicked the “Finish” button and save
5. Made a form based on wp_posts:
   1. This screenshot is of the form I made to browse the raw data of my WordPress posts from my Thoughts and Notions weblog and is showing data from this post in particular:
   2.