OOo Basic crash course: Creating a simple game using strings in a database
Just because OpenOffice.org Basic is designed to automate mundane tasks doesn’t mean that you must use it only for serious work. It’s a programming language after all, and nothing stops you from using it to write something fun. Today we’ll use it write a simple game where you have to guess a word, a letter at a time, from among words you’ve stored in a Base database. Although this is not a particularly sophisticated game, it contains a couple of string manipulation techniques and a clever trick for picking a random record from a database, which you might find useful when writing your own macros.
Before you start coding the game, you have to create a simple Base database (let’s call it “WordDB”) with a table called “wordlist” containing two fields: the “ID” integer field that acts as a primary key, and the “Word” text field used for storing words. Populate the database with the words you want to use in the game.
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