Microsoft® Office Access 2003 Step by Step

Importing Information from a Delimited Text File

Text files are the common denominator of documents. Almost every program that works with words and numbers can generate some kind of a text file, in addition to files in its native format. Access can import tabular data (tables and lists) from text files if the data has been stored in a recognizable format. The most common formats are called delimited and fixed width (which will be discussed later in this chapter).

In a delimited text file, each record ends in a carriage return, and each field is separated from the next by a comma or some other special character, called a delimiter. If a field contains ...