opening file with over 65000 records

[Guest]

I have a tab delimited file which if opened in Excel would have about 80,000
rows - something my Excel 2002 cannot do. It can only open about 65,000
rows. It was suggested that I could open this file in Access but although
I've used Excel for years, I am not familiar with Access.

Is there a simple way to open such a file in Access 2002 (which I also own
but have not used) in a format familiar to someone who uses spreadsheets?
That is with the data listed in rows similar to what one would see in a
spreadsheet?

Thank you.

Jeff

 

[John W. Vinson]

I have a tab delimited file which if opened in Excel would have about 80,000
rows - something my Excel 2002 cannot do. It can only open about 65,000
rows. It was suggested that I could open this file in Access but although
I've used Excel for years, I am not familiar with Access.

Is there a simple way to open such a file in Access 2002 (which I also own
but have not used) in a format familiar to someone who uses spreadsheets?
That is with the data listed in rows similar to what one would see in a
spreadsheet?

Thank you.

Jeff

An Access Database is limited to 2GByte, and a million-row table is not a real
problem; and a table Datasheet looks very much like an Excel spreadsheet.

The resemblance is VERY DECIEVING. A relational table is a very different kind
of entity than a spreadsheet: no calculations in fields, no defined order of
rows (a table is an unordered heap of records), etc. If you're expert in Excel
you will need to UNlearn a lot of things to make effective use of Access.

That said... if you just want to import this tab delimited file and view it,
sort it, or search it, Access should do fine. Open a new Access database and
use File... Get External Data... Import; select "Txt" from "files of type",
and navigate to the file you want to read.

Here's some resources for learning more about Access:

Jeff Conrad's resources page:
http://www.accessmvp.com/JConrad/accessjunkie/resources.html

The Access Web resources page:
http://www.mvps.org/access/resources/index.html

Roger Carlson's tutorials, samples and tips:
http://www.rogersaccesslibrary.com/

A free tutorial written by Crystal:
http://allenbrowne.com/casu-22.html

A video how-to series by Crystal:
http://www.YouTube.com/user/LearnAccessByCrystal

MVP Allen Browne's tutorials:
http://allenbrowne.com/links.html#Tutorials

 

[Guest]

An Access Database is limited to 2GByte, and a million-row table is
not a real problem; and a table Datasheet looks very much like an
Excel spreadsheet.

The resemblance is VERY DECIEVING. A relational table is a very
different kind of entity than a spreadsheet: no calculations in
fields, no defined order of rows (a table is an unordered heap of
records), etc. If you're expert in Excel you will need to UNlearn a
lot of things to make effective use of Access.

That said... if you just want to import this tab delimited file and
view it, sort it, or search it, Access should do fine. Open a new
Access database and use File... Get External Data... Import; select
"Txt" from "files of type", and navigate to the file you want to read.

Here's some resources for learning more about Access:

Jeff Conrad's resources page:
http://www.accessmvp.com/JConrad/accessjunkie/resources.html

The Access Web resources page:
http://www.mvps.org/access/resources/index.html

Roger Carlson's tutorials, samples and tips:
http://www.rogersaccesslibrary.com/

A free tutorial written by Crystal:
http://allenbrowne.com/casu-22.html

A video how-to series by Crystal:
http://www.YouTube.com/user/LearnAccessByCrystal

MVP Allen Browne's tutorials:
http://allenbrowne.com/links.html#Tutorials

Thank you.

 

[Guest]

An Access Database is limited to 2GByte, and a million-row table is
not a real problem; and a table Datasheet looks very much like an
Excel spreadsheet.

The resemblance is VERY DECIEVING. A relational table is a very
different kind of entity than a spreadsheet: no calculations in
fields, no defined order of rows (a table is an unordered heap of
records), etc. If you're expert in Excel you will need to UNlearn a
lot of things to make effective use of Access.

That said... if you just want to import this tab delimited file and
view it, sort it, or search it, Access should do fine. Open a new
Access database and use File... Get External Data... Import; select
"Txt" from "files of type", and navigate to the file you want to read.

Here's some resources for learning more about Access:

<snip>

Thanks for replying John.

Actually this set of data is not one on which I make calculations. I only
use Excel because I am familiar with it. It consists of a set of text data
arranged in columns which I will later process for a website php search
engine to do text searches on it. The only things I need to do with the raw
data in Acess or Excel is:

1) Import from tab delimited files (which I have so far created in Excel)
2) sort alphabetically based on one (or several columns) while keeping the
columns correctly associated with the corresponding data in each row (like
in Excel)
3) Add rows of new data
4) Export the new total data back into tab delimited text files for further
processing.

Despite my limited knowledge of Access it seems that for these functions it
would work just like Excel (sorting and exporting to tab delimited text
files) - or am I wrong because of my ignorance of Access?

Again thank you so much for helping.

Jeff

 

[John S. Ford, MD]

Sounds like Access will be perfect for your needs. You may find that
there's no reason, after processing, to convert your table into a
tab-delimited text file for later handling.

John

 

[John W. Vinson]

1) Import from tab delimited files (which I have so far created in Excel)
2) sort alphabetically based on one (or several columns) while keeping the
columns correctly associated with the corresponding data in each row (like
in Excel)
3) Add rows of new data
4) Export the new total data back into tab delimited text files for further
processing.

Despite my limited knowledge of Access it seems that for these functions it
would work just like Excel (sorting and exporting to tab delimited text
files) - or am I wrong because of my ignorance of Access?

With *that limited set of requirements*, Access should be just fine; IMO
better than Excel, for that matter. You could import into a Table; create a
Query (or multiple queries) based on the table to sort by any combination of
fields; export to text files, or do the processing more directly from Access.

My caveats were because it's pretty common for Excel experts to be misled by
the superficial similarities to think of Access as "Excel on steroids", which
it isn't.

 

[Guest]

With *that limited set of requirements*, Access should be just fine;
IMO better than Excel, for that matter. You could import into a
Table; create a Query (or multiple queries) based on the table to
sort by any combination of fields; export to text files, or do the
processing more directly from Access.

My caveats were because it's pretty common for Excel experts to be
misled by the superficial similarities to think of Access as "Excel
on steroids", which it isn't.

Thank you both. That is what I thought and it would be a way to begin
learning how to properly use Access.

One question would give me an immediate help:
Access imported an "ID" field which I am guessing was just the original
number of the rows before sorting. Is it?

 

[John W. Vinson]

One question would give me an immediate help:
Access imported an "ID" field which I am guessing was just the original
number of the rows before sorting. Is it?

Only by chance. I'm guessing that it's an "Autonumber" field, which - IN THIS
CIRCUMSTANCE - will be assigned sequentially. It cannot be edited, and it's
not really a "line number"; new records will be assigned the next sequential
number, but if you delete a record - or even press <Esc> to cancel an
insertion - or run some types of append queries, the next number will be
permanently "used up" and there'll be a gap in the sequence. The ID should be
used only under the hood as a meaningless unique identifier, for joining to
other tables and the like.