Hi Marilyn,
There's no way to have more than 255 columns in an Access table. The
closest you can get is to have two tables with fewer columns and a
one-to-one relationship between them (and even then you won't be able to
include all the fields in a single query).
However, almost any table with that many columns can be normalised into
two or more narrower tables (for instance, there will almost certainly
be groups of repeating fields for different time periods or age groups
or localities or some such).
One approach is to import the file into a table with just one memo field
and an autonumber primary key, so the entire line from the textfile is
imported as a single field. You can then run a series of queries to
parse the individual fields out of the memo field and put them into
other tables.
Another is to do some preliminary carving-up at the textfile level
(using tools such as Perl, VBSCript and/or the Gnu textutils from
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/) to get the file into pieces each of
which contain few enough fields to import. For instance, the "cut"
textutil can split a text file vertically, with some fields going into
one output file, the rest into another, and the primary key into both.
I need to import a file with 269 columns of data. Is there
anyway to get around Access 2000 limit of 255 columns if
data?
John Nurick [Microsoft Access MVP]
Please respond in the newgroup and not by email.
