[AccessD] Excel to Access

On 7 Dec 2005 at 11:32, Jim Dettman wrote:

> John,
> 
>  I've had problems the other way to.  Had a text field in Access with a
> store number in it.  One record had
> 
> '01010'
> 
> another
> 
>  '1010'
> 
>  Two different stores (customer's data; so don't ask<g>) Upon export, Excel
> would ignore the text data type and treat the column as a number.  As a
> result, the first record would end up with the leading 0 removed. Thus I'd
> end up with two records with 1010
> 
>   You really need to watch what you do with Excel when you import/export.
> 

Had one job where I was importing analysis data. The client sent leaf 
samples overseas for analysis and received the data back as CSV files or 
some such.  They had lots of these files they wanted to import into a 
database.  Problem was they had opened them previously. SInce Office 
defaults to Excel for CSV files, they ended up reading them using Excel.
If you do as little as resize a column, Excel asks you if you want to "save 
the changes".   The users, just kept accepting the defaults in the reply 
dialogs and did save the changes.

Problem was that several fields contained strings like "2SEP", "3SEP" etc.  
Excel converted them all into dates.  :-(

-- 
Stuart