On 7 Sep 2006 05:17:34 -0700, "hharriel@gmail.com" <hharriel@gmail.comwrote:
Quote:
>Hi,
>I am hoping someone can help me with an issue I am having with excel
>and ms access. I have collected data (which are in individual excel
>files) from 49 different school districts. All districts have used the
>same excel template and populated the same 32 data fields (columns). I
>created one large excel file from all 49 files which gives me a master
>table of 60,000 or so records. I have tried to import this master
>table into access to run some queries and as I expected, access
>imported some of the records but not all, creating an errors table for
>me. I suspected that I needed to go and reformat each column in the
>excel mater table, so that the formatting for each record was
>identical. For example I made sure that all columns that needed to be
>text were formatted as text (i.e., f name, l name.), etc. More
>importantly, I have a unique student identifier, that is 10 digits long
>that is assigned to each record and I made sure that this column was
>formatted as text so that I can link it to another table of student
>information that I already have. When importing the excel master table
>into access, it does not import a significant amount of the student
>id's, leaving that information within a particular record blank.
>Access will import other field information for records, so it is not
>rejecting the record altogether. I have also tried linking the table
>instead of reporting and when linked for some records, access displays
>"??NUMBER" in the cell, again an indication that access cannot
>interpret that particular cell information. I have also tried saving
>the master table as a .txt file and them importing, but still no
>success.
>
>I am convinced that this is do to all the different "output
>formatting styles" from reporting districts when they generated their
>files for me using their own student information systems. Does anyone
>have any suggestions on have to reformat/clean the master table?? Or
>any suggestion on how to perform an import without having such a high
>percentage of my records rejected during the import process?
>
>Thanks so much.
If you create a table in advance with enough fields, all of type text and 255 characters long, and
import by appending to this you can import almost anything and sort out the data types later.
If your data is already in Excel this should work quite easily.
