Linking from Excel 2003 to Access 2003

[Peg]

I am new at this process. I am trying to link and Excel spreadsheet that
contains two columns. The first column has 1 to 2 digits and some rows have
a letter. The second column has the description of the first column. When I
import this over to Access as a new table, the record where I have digits and
letters are giving me #NUM!. I tried the following reply, but it is not
working. I would appreciate any help. Thank You

Reply 6/13/2006
Since Access has strong datatyping (every field must have a defined
datatype) while Excel does not (each cell is independent, a column may
contain any combination of datatypes), Access must *guess* the
appropriate datatypes when importing or linking to a spreadsheet. It
does so by looking at the first few (I don't know the numeric value of
"few" here <g>) rows. If they are all numeric, Access treats that
column as if it were of Number type.

If further down the sheet you have non-numeric data you'll get this
error. A common example is Zip or PostCodes - if you have five-digit
numbers in the first several rows, and further down something like
83660-6354 or N3Y 8B1, you'll get an error.


One getaround is to put a dummy row at the top of the spreadsheet with
an unambiguous text value ('X for example) in each such column.


John W. Vinson[MVP]

 

[Arvin Meyer [MVP]]

Either manually create the table or after the import change the datatype to
text, delete all the data in the table and import it again to the existing
table. The second import will force the data to the proper datatype.

 

[Peg]

Since I am trying to link to Access due to frequent changes with the process,
is there any other way to correct the problem? The last resort would be to
import the data. Thanks

 

[Arvin Meyer [MVP]]

That's the only way that I can think of that works consistently.
--
Arvin Meyer, MCP, MVP
http://www.datastrat.com
http://www.mvps.org/access
http://www.accessmvp.com