scribus and open office base

So I'm trying to create a meeting schedule in scribus. I decided that it would be prudent to try and create a database first given that I have plenty of time to do it right now (the number of computer services calls i'm getting averaging about 2 a week)

Unfortunately, scribus and open office base seem to have high learning curves. my aptitude for windows programs does me nothing for these programs given that they seem to require a good understanding of the underlying code. what was really bugging me was that after I created a table for the meetings with fields such as "time", "location", "day of week", etc.; I found that going back and trying to modify the fields was impossible. so after re-creating the table 3x, I got frustrated and gave up.

i'm thinking of just going back to microsoft access even though it's proprietary. it also makes me think that the programming community that works on these programs might benefit from more closely copying the interfaces and commands of the corresponding windows programs. afterall, if windows copies all of their stuff from apple, why can't the open-source community copy all their stuff from windows?