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#1
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How to import plain text into workable tables/cells?
I have several rather extensive text files (extracted from an antiquated
local database) that I wish to import into either Access or Excel as functional databases. So far I've had the best results importing into Excel, as this at least manages to divide the info into several fields somewhat, although still not nearly as well as I'd like. Several elements get crammed together in one cell when I choose to import seperately. In Access, the results are even worse and I can't even manage to make decent cells out of the info. Most of the time the info gets imported into one column, or into a zillion ones if I choose space as a seperator symbol, which I truly don't want of course. I've tried tinkering about with both applications a bit, but can't seem to generate moderately desireable results. I'm gonna try now to improve the textual layout of the source text in Word, see if that can improve the import performance slightly, but apart from that I wonder what I can do to import the text into either Excel or Access into proper, functional cells. Please give me some feedback. Any help or ideas would be appreciated. |
#2
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How to import plain text into workable tables/cells?
The old database would presumably have had some form of separator between
the text fields. Can you identify that as you separator? If it is a case of having eg 2 spaces as the separator, perhaps you could use find & replace in Word to change these to eg commas. -- Ian -- "Xane" wrote in message ... I have several rather extensive text files (extracted from an antiquated local database) that I wish to import into either Access or Excel as functional databases. So far I've had the best results importing into Excel, as this at least manages to divide the info into several fields somewhat, although still not nearly as well as I'd like. Several elements get crammed together in one cell when I choose to import seperately. In Access, the results are even worse and I can't even manage to make decent cells out of the info. Most of the time the info gets imported into one column, or into a zillion ones if I choose space as a seperator symbol, which I truly don't want of course. I've tried tinkering about with both applications a bit, but can't seem to generate moderately desireable results. I'm gonna try now to improve the textual layout of the source text in Word, see if that can improve the import performance slightly, but apart from that I wonder what I can do to import the text into either Excel or Access into proper, functional cells. Please give me some feedback. Any help or ideas would be appreciated. |
#3
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How to import plain text into workable tables/cells?
As Ian said, separators are the ones to look for. You may have to inclue the
Consecutine sparators ie you may have commas and tabs or spaces and semi-colons. Expriment with it. You could try my viewer. It will open just about any type of non-application file (not access or excel FileLocationDatabase.exe It is written in vb6 so it is an executable file. It is zipped at http://au.geocities.com/windsofmark -- Mark "Xane" wrote: I have several rather extensive text files (extracted from an antiquated local database) that I wish to import into either Access or Excel as functional databases. So far I've had the best results importing into Excel, as this at least manages to divide the info into several fields somewhat, although still not nearly as well as I'd like. Several elements get crammed together in one cell when I choose to import seperately. In Access, the results are even worse and I can't even manage to make decent cells out of the info. Most of the time the info gets imported into one column, or into a zillion ones if I choose space as a seperator symbol, which I truly don't want of course. I've tried tinkering about with both applications a bit, but can't seem to generate moderately desireable results. I'm gonna try now to improve the textual layout of the source text in Word, see if that can improve the import performance slightly, but apart from that I wonder what I can do to import the text into either Excel or Access into proper, functional cells. Please give me some feedback. Any help or ideas would be appreciated. |
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