A temp solution to "Record is too large"

[alpineillusion]

I am trying to import a fixed width data file that has been handed down
to me, but am encountering the "record is too large" problem that oh so
many people have encountered before.

The specification I've set up to import this data has 366 fields, with
a total size of 1120 characters per record. This is the part that
confuses me, because I was under the impression that Access doesn't
complain about record size until 2000 characters. At first I used Text
fields accross the board, but of course that did not work. I then
changed the fields to type Memo, but curiously that still gives me the
"Record is too large" error.

I know that the academic solution is to normalize, but at the moment my
primary objective is to just get this data into a db and be done with
it. Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

There's a 255 field limit in addition to the 2000 character limit.

Is this a text file? You may have to bite the bullet, read the text file in
line by line, and use SQL to populate the appropriate tables in your
normalized solution.

 

[Bill Mosca, MS Access MVP]

An Access table can have up to 255 fields.

I don't know of a work around except to create an import spec for the first
255 fields and one for the last 311 plus the primary key. Import specs allow
you to skip fields. Hopefully, the spec wizard will show all the fields so
you can select the ones for each spec.

Once you get it all into your database, you can split it up into whatever
tables you want.