Created attachment 156918 [details] LibreOffice Base, no data source I am working on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS x86_64 fully patched. LibreOffice version is 6.0.7.3. I am trying to connect to a MS Access database. At Step (1) I selected "connect to existing database" using "odbc source". At Step (2) I am presented with when attempting to browse to the MDB database (see image). The problem is, I have not been able to set up a data source or connect to the database. At the moment the problem is with the documentation. The documentation is at https://documentation.libreoffice.org/assets/Uploads/Documentation/en/GS5.1/HTML/GS5108-GettingStartedWithBase.html. The docs say how to create a a LibreOffice Base database, and how to create or register a ODB database; but I can't find anything about MDB databases. Clicking the Help button in the Data Source dialog opens help for LibreOffice Writer. Sigh... I've been fumbling through the process, but I have not been successful. Also see https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/223644/how-to-create-data-source-for-mdb-database/ and https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/1858165 . Please provide the documentation for creating or registering a data source for a MDB database. If LibreOffice does not support MDB databases, then please clearly state it in the documentation. I've wasted 1 1/2 days on this (on and off), and others have been wasting their time on this going back at least 10 years. It is a chronic problem, and users are wasting a lot of time due to poor documentation.
@Noloader : why is the subject header about ODBC to MDB when you are on Linux ? What makes you think that an ODBC driver (in this case unixODBC provided by the Linux distro) would allow you to connect to an Access MDB file ? Shouldn't you be trying with another tool, e.g. : https://www.binarytides.com/open-view-ms-access-mdb-files-in-ubuntu-linux/ or https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/145877/mdb-files-not-loading-to-base/ "UCanAccess" which uses a JDBC driver
For general usage on setting up a connection to an ODBC defined datasource, there is actually quite a lot of documentation out there, for example: https://www.easysoft.com/applications/openoffice_org/odbc.html much of the older documentation written for OpenOffice.org is still valid. Note that ODB and ODBC are not the same thing - the first is the filename extension, the second a protocol for accessing data sources which is made accessible via a separate driver. I am not aware of an ODBC-compliant driver which runs on Linux that will allow you to gain access to a MDB file.
See also : https://github.com/brianb/mdbtools The documentation in LO is limited to general points about the possibility of connecting to an ODBC compliant pre-defined datasource. The specifics are, well, specific to each type of database to which you want to connect via ODBC and as such depend very much on the ODBC driver.