Office® XP Development with VBA

File Access

In broad outline, all VBA file access consists of the same three steps: opening the file, reading from or writing to the file, and closing the file. However, there are three different types of files available, with each type suited for different kinds of data. The three types are sequential, random, and binary.

A sequential file is a text file, meaning that the data in the file consists of characters. The data in a sequential file is stored as a series of variable-length units, called records. If you store a number in a sequential file, that's one record. If you store a string, that's another record. The records are variable length because each record's length is not fixed, but is determined by its contents. The end of one record, ...