Linked table shows no data

[Guest]

I am trying to link a .CSV file to Access. When using the Link Text Wizard,
I see the data that's in the table and complete the steps. Once the steps
are completed and the table is linked, I open the table and there is no data.
The field names and only one row of blank data.

I linked two other .CSV tables and the data shows. Any idea why the data is
not showing for this linked table?

 

[John Nurick]

Probably because there's something different about the file. For instance,
text files from non-Windows computers sometimes use different characters for
the line breaks, and this can confuse Access's import routine. So can text
files that contain null bytes (i.e. bytes whose value is 00, nothing to do
with a database's NULL values).

If you open the file with Notepad, does it show up properly, or are there
incorrect line breaks and/or other oddities?

 

[Guest]

this file uses the tilda (~) sign for null values. i tried opening it in
notepad but get the error that the file is too big. could that be the issue
and why the file won't link to Access? the file has over 4 million records.

 

[John Nurick]

I'm not sure what the limits are on recent versions of Notepad. Mine
(Windows XP, SP2) has just opened a 128MB file but choked on a 610MB
one, so I presume your problem file is somewhere in that range.

I've never tried linking to a file in that size range, though they can
be imported, with care. For troubleshooting, I'd try something like
this:

1) Create a new file containing the first few thousand records, and see
if you can link to that. To extract the first N records I'd use the
'head' utility (part of the Gnu utilities downloadable from
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net), but there are other utilities that
will do the same job.

2) If the shorter file won't link either, suspect a problem with its
structure, such as the line break or null byte issues I mentioned
earlier. (As I said before, null bytes and Null values are quite
different things.)

3) If the shorter file links OK, then either there's a problem with the
structure further down the file (e.g. a record with the wrong number of
commas in it, or incorrectly quoted quote marks in the data) or else the
size really is too great.

 

[visvire]

I realize this is an outdated posted but i didn't really see a solution here so wanted to post mine.

I encountered a similar situation when attempting to import a 40mb csv file - excel 03 had a max of 65K rows so that option was out.

My CSV was comma delineated, although the problem was being caused by an additional text qualifier that was included as a prefix, in this case, the "=" sign. I tested this out on a small snip of the csv code and was successful. Then I added access the main file remotely and cleared out the = sign so I could still work on my main PC. Took 1 hr to scrub. Hope this works for you, (e-mail address removed) if you have any questions/comments. Thanks!