Microsoft® Office Access 2003 Inside Out

Importing Text Files

You can import data from a text file into Microsoft Access even though, unlike the data in a spreadsheet, the data in a text file isn’t arranged in columns and rows in an orderly way. You make the data in a text file understandable to Access either by creating a delimited text file, in which special characters delimit the fields in each record, or by creating a fixed-width text file, in which each field occupies the same location in each record.

Preparing a Text File

You might be able to import some text files into Access without changing them, particularly if a text file was created by a program using standard field delimiters. However, in many cases, you’ll have to modify the contents of the file, define the file for Access ...