Importing Problem with Phone Numbers

[Guest]

Hi,

I have an excel file with phone numbers. Some are international. It is a
text filed in Excel. Whenever I import them into Access, access changes them
into an exponential number. When I reimport them back into excel from access
it stays as an exponential number which is a problem. Is there a way to
avoid this and keep the field as is?

Thanks,

 

[John Nurick]

Hi Chuck,

Excel doesn't have text fields. The closest you can get is formatting
cells as Text, and as you've discovered Access doesn't pay much
attention to that.

Things should work better if you create the Access table before you
import the data from Excel. That way you can define a text field for the
phone numbers. Alternatively, prefix each number in Excel with an
apostrophe, e.g.
'+1 (888) 555-1234
This doesn't show up in the worksheet or in Access, but ensures that
both Access and Excel will treat them as text.

Or wait for Access 2007, which will (unless it changes from the beta
versions) allow you to specify field types when importing from Excel.

 

[MH]

Or wait for Access 2007, which will (unless it changes from the beta
versions) allow you to specify field types when importing from Excel.

Thank God for that!

MH