Importing Excel Into Access - Stripping Out Records Like X546 But Not 2356

**jessekanclerz** · 03-26-2009, 09:59 AM

Hi,

I'm trying to import/convert an excel spreadsheet into an access table.

When the spreadsheet is imported, not all of the SKU's carry over. For instance,
numbers such as 1827 appear, however sku's such as X4756 do not.

I tried having access set it's own primary key in place of the skus, but it
still it gets rid of sku's with numbers.

Maybe there's a setting to allow numbers and letters in an import, but I haven't
found it.

Please help, I'm using Access + Excel 2003.

**ConneXionLost** · 03-26-2009, 11:16 AM

Access will look at the first record of an imported Excel file to determine the data type for each column. If your first record has a pure number type of SKU, then Access will think the data for all the SKUs should be a number, and will then exclude alphanumeric SKUs. One simple solution is to ensure the first record has an alphanumeric SKU so Access will treat all the SKUs as text instead of a number.

**jessekanclerz** · 03-26-2009, 11:19 AM

Thanks for answering ConneXionLost,

However, I managed to figure out a solution. Saving the excel worksheet as a csv and importing it will allow you to change the data type option to text instead of numeral. This allowed me to import alphanumeric skus.

**heniek** · 04-04-2009, 11:25 PM

Perhaps a simpler method would be to "preformat" the column in Excel where the SKU's are as text.

The proper steps are to first start with a blank sheet, format the SKU column as text, then populate that column with SKU's. Anything that is then typed in that column will be treated as text, even if pure numbers are entered.
Should be easy for Access to import without dropping any records.

Also, no need to convert anything to CSV format. You can simply work with the original file.