Judy,
The "Len" function works in both VBA and Excel.

In VBA it can determine the length of string variables and the length of data in a cell....
x = Len(Range("B5") or x = Len(strVariable)

In Excel this works... = Len(B5)

I suspect that Access will do what you want, though I am not the person to ask.
--
Jim Cone
San Francisco, USA
http://www.realezsites.com/bus/primitivesoftware
(Excel Add-ins / Excel Programming)


"Judy Ward" wrote in message
I have code to import an Excel spreadsheet into an Access database. What I
am finding is that Access decides the data type for a field by looking in the
first 25 rows of the spreadsheet. If it sees more than 255 characters in a
cell it decides the column is "memo", and if it doesn't it decided the field
is "text" and truncates after 255 characters--this is not desired!

Right now I am manually looking at the rows to find one that has a large
amount of data, cutting and inserting it at the top of the spreadsheet. I
would really like to include this step in my code but have no idea how to go
about it.

Can anyone help?

Thank you,
Judy