Importing more than 255 fields from text file to Access

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
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Guest

Hi,

I had sets of data with 340 columns whereby I am trying to import in MS Access
There seems to be a limitation in terms of the number of fields that can be
held for each table.

1) If i wanted to split the Import to 2 tables for the different fields, how
can i do that?

2) After the split, how can i create an unique ID in the 2 tables in order
for me to join back the data?

Pls help thank you...
 
In my experience a "wide" text file such as this is always contains
redundant data and repeating columns and usually contain many columns
that aren't of interest and needn't be imported.

So I always use text file tools to convert the original wide file into
one or more files that have sensible numbers of columns and can easily
be imported into a normalised data structure in Access. The tools I
use are
- Windows versions of Unix utilities (downloadable from
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net)
- Perl (http://activeperl.com)
and my txtnrm.pl utility which converts a file with hundreds or
thousands of columns into a tall narrow file that can be imported
(http://www.j.nurick.dial.pipex.com/Code/index.htm).

It's extremely unlikely that best approach is to import the data into
two tables related 1:1 and with 340 fields between them. If that was
necessary, I'd use either the Unix 'cut' utility or Perl to create two
text files each of which would contain the primary key field(s) from
the original, plus about half the other fields. If the original
doesn't include a primary key, I'd create one by using the Unix 'nl'
utility to add a column of line numbers.
 
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