Foreign character problem in Access Import

[J. T.]

I'm using Microsoft Office Professional 2003.

I'm trying to import a text file into Access, but foreign-language
characters like the accented "o" in Spanish display as garbage characters,
even when I use the Arial Unicode MS font.

The text file was extracted from a different DBMS as an RTF, which I opened
and saved as plain text in Word. All the characters in both versions of the
text file display properly in Word.

If I import the text file into Excel, I have the same problem of losing the
foreign characters. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks!

 

[Clifford Bass]

Hi J. T.,

Make sure you are saving as a Unicode Text file. Otherwise it may not
be able to convert the foreign characters correctly to your default character
set.

Clifford Bass

 

[J. T.]

Thanks for the tip, Clifford. In Word, though, the only choices I have for
saving to text are Rich Text and Plain Text. Should there be another one for
Unicode?

Also, when I convert to plain text in Word, the characters still display
properly in Word. And I can cut-and-paste them into Access and Excel and they
display properly. I just can't import them without them becoming mangled.

 

[Clifford Bass]

Hi J. T.,

When you do a Save As in Word, choose "Plain Text (*.txt)" and then
click on the Save button, it should give you a File Conversion dialog.
Choose the Other encoding radio button and then choose Unicode. If you do
not get the File Conversion dialog let me know. Word can read it in
correctly probably because it is doing something with double-byte characters
to represent those non-single-byte/non-ASCII characters. I suspect it works
enclusively with Unicode once it reads the file in. But I do not know that
for sure. If it does, then copying and pasting would work fine between Word
and Access/Excel.

Clifford Bass

 

[Stevew42]

Hi J. T.,

When you do a Save As in Word, choose "Plain Text (*.txt)" and then
click on the Save button, it should give you a File Conversion dialog.
Choose the Other encoding radio button and then choose Unicode. If you do
not get the File Conversion dialog let me know. Word can read it in
correctly probably because it is doing something with double-byte characters
to represent those non-single-byte/non-ASCII characters. I suspect it works
enclusively with Unicode once it reads the file in. But I do not know that
for sure. If it does, then copying and pasting would work fine between Word
and Access/Excel.

Clifford Bass

"J. T." wrote:

> Thanks for the tip, Clifford. In Word, though, the only choices I have for
> saving to text are Rich Text and Plain Text. Should there be another one for
> Unicode?
>
> Also, when I convert to plain text in Word, the characters still display
> properly in Word. And I can cut-and-paste them into Access and Excel and they
> display properly. I just can't import them without them becoming mangled.

Thanks - solved my similar problem reading a text file containing foreign language via Excel query table.