formatting data for import into ms access

[hershey]

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.

 

[moon]

I experienced Access gives trouble importing Excel-sheets, if the number of
characters in the Access-field is not set to 255.

 

[Kevin B]

Access will cause error if the field in Access has been defined as a number
type (Long, double, currency, etc...) and the Excel file has a string value
instead. That could be the source of the issue.

Additionally, text fields in Access do not accept zero length strings by
default, populating the empty field with a Null value. Excel does not have
comparable vallue for blank cells so set the ALLOW ZERO LENGTH property for
all of your text fields to yes, that way a blank cell doesn't cause the
record to imported improperly.