table with 400 columns?

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Can one have a table with up to 400 columns in Access?
David
Click to expand...

I assume by 'columns' you mean fields.
Read Access Help
Specifications
Number of fields in a table 255

If you need 400 fields in one table, I would say your database is
grossly mal-designed.
 
Can one have a table with up to 400 columns in Access?
David
Click to expand...

No. And you would never need one, in any properly normalized database.
You're limited to 255 fields, and I've never needed more than 60.

Why do you feel that you do need this horrendously wide bedsheet?

John W. Vinson[MVP]
Join the online Access Chats
Tuesday 11am EDT - Thursday 3:30pm EDT
http://community.compuserve.com/msdevapps
 
The "raw" data that I need to work with come in the form of a .txt or .csv
file with up to 400 columns or fields. (They are actually downloaded from the
web.)
I would like to write some queries to extract the fields I need, and perhaps
make a number of smaller tables to replace the original table.
I now hear that neither Access nor Excel will handle that many columns.
Any ideas how I may overcome the problem?
I suppose I could download 200 hundred fields at a time.

David
 
The "raw" data that I need to work with come in the form of a .txt or .csv
file with up to 400 columns or fields. (They are actually downloaded from the
web.)
I would like to write some queries to extract the fields I need, and perhaps
make a number of smaller tables to replace the original table.
I now hear that neither Access nor Excel will handle that many columns.
Any ideas how I may overcome the problem?
I suppose I could download 200 hundred fields at a time.
Click to expand...

I would suggest writing (or hiring somebody to write) some fairly
simple VBA code to parse the data out of this text file into some
normalized tables. Is the structure of the text file consistant? Are
there fieldnames in the first row, or do you have to figure that the
318th field is this, and the 319th field is that?


John W. Vinson[MVP]
Join the online Access Chats
Tuesday 11am EDT - Thursday 3:30pm EDT
http://community.compuserve.com/msdevapps
 
I am not sure if this is too much to ask,
but if it is simple enough and if you wouldn't mind,
could you write me a sample illustrative program to extract fields from a
..txt data file with just a few columns named field1, field2, ..etc.?
I would like to learn a llittle bit of programming in VBA, have had some
exposure to it, but have never created my own program in VBA.
This would be an opportunity for me to get started.
Thanks.

David
 
fredg said:
I assume by 'columns' you mean fields.
Read Access Help
Click to expand...

Read ISO 11179-1 (Specification and standardization of data elements):

traditional: file / record / field
relational: relation / tuple / attribute
RDBMS: table / row / column

The OP specified 'table' and not a traditional file structure, so your
correction of 'column' to 'field' is erroneous.

Jamie.

--
 
Jamie Collins said:
Read ISO 11179-1 (Specification and standardization of data elements):

traditional: file / record / field
relational: relation / tuple / attribute
RDBMS: table / row / column

The OP specified 'table' and not a traditional file structure, so your
correction of 'column' to 'field' is erroneous.
Click to expand...

Guess it depends on your perspective. With DAO, TableDef objects have a
Fields collection, while with ADOX, Table objects have a Columns collection.
That means that the correction is appropriate if you're used to DAO.
 
Douglas J. Steele said:
Guess it depends on your perspective. With DAO, TableDef objects have a
Fields collection, while with ADOX, Table objects have a Columns collection.
That means that the correction is appropriate if you're used to DAO.
Click to expand...

As you say, it's a metter of perspective. The approach I'd take is, if
the customer uses the term 'column' or 'field' take it as valid and
use the same term in reply, perhaps alternatively use your preferred
term in reply. I'd say it was not appropriate to 'correct' a customer
because there is no one correct terminology.

Jamie.

--
 
david said:
I am not sure if this is too much to ask,
but if it is simple enough and if you wouldn't mind,
could you write me a sample illustrative program to extract fields from a
.txt data file with just a few columns named field1, field2, ..etc.?
I would like to learn a llittle bit of programming in VBA, have had some
exposure to it, but have never created my own program in VBA.
This would be an opportunity for me to get started.
Thanks.
Click to expand...

I'd like to, tell me something about the file. Is it (comma) separated
or with fixed width columns? Can I be sure the file starts with a header
line (that is, the column names)? And I will create 'on the fly' a
structure to store the data.
 
david said:
I am not sure if this is too much to ask,
but if it is simple enough and if you wouldn't mind,
could you write me a sample illustrative program to extract fields from a
.txt data file with just a few columns named field1, field2, ..etc.?
I would like to learn a llittle bit of programming in VBA, have had some
exposure to it, but have never created my own program in VBA.
This would be an opportunity for me to get started.
Click to expand...


This may be a bit of overkill for your problem, but it is a
general solution or, at least, it provides a detailed
example:

http://www.mvps.org/access/modules/mdl0057.htm
 
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