Microsoft® Office Access 2003 Step by Step

Importing Information from a Fixed-Width Text File

The only way to get the data of many older programs into Access is to export the data to a fixed-width text file and then import that file into Access. In a fixed-width text file, the same field in every record contains exactly the same number of characters. If the actual data doesn’t fill a field, the field is padded with spaces so that the starting point of the data in the next field is the same number of characters from the beginning of every record. For example, if the first field contains 12 characters, the second field always starts 13 characters from the beginning of the record, even if the ...