MacInTouch Reader Reports: ODBC and the Mac covers a couple years of struggle in Mac-land regarding the availability of ODBC drivers for providing distributed database connectivity.

I’m looking into it because I’d like to read-write to my MySQL implementation from Word, not someting I expected to succeed at since MySQL is a direct threat to SQL Server’s market.

To my surprise, it’s not impossible, only tough. First, I still use Word98 in Classic, which does not provide easy ODBC support, although you can make it work if you twist your body around into a sufficient number of uncomfortable positions.

However, in both Word 2001 and Office v.X, mac ODBC is much more readily supported via a number of routes – none super user friendly, I think; but less of a forced march. Mind you, this is some connecting of the dots going on here – I did NOT find a perfect example of a simple, user oriented how-to anyplace, except maybe here:
AugSOFT Office98/2001 docs.

The problems with these older drivers are twofold: one, they’re not free, natch; and two, they don;t offer MySQL support, since MySQL had yet to gather steam back then.

AugSOFT offers a standalone server-bridge (for wintel) that can work with MySQL, but that’s beyond my scope.

On the looks promising front, www.iodbc.org and Openlink Software both offer work in the direction of tying MySQL to ODBC connectivity; as seems to be the case for most of this, it looks as though nothing is perfectly meeting my Word-MySQL jones on the matter.

hmmm.