PowerPivot Importing

[ClevelandSteve]

I’m working on my first project with PowerPivot (2010 version) and have quickly run into a problem. I am importing data from a text file and one of the fields is an item number with a text/string data type. The problem is that in the import wizard window all of the sample records just happen to be numeric in this field. PowerPivot sees this and assigns the field a whole number data type. When the rest of the file is read any record with an alpha character is imported as blank. Is there a way to prevent this? I’ve never seen an import procedure where you can’t set the data type manually.

Edit: I have tried to change the data type post import and then click the refresh button, but it didn't work.

[JosephP]

the simplest way is to create a schema.ini file in the same directory-it can be as simple as

[filenamehere.txt]
ColNameHeader=True
MaxScanRows=0

which should make PP scan all rows to determine data type. you can also specify datatypes for all columns if you prefer

[JosephP]

for reference of schema.ini file structures see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...=vs.85%29.aspx

[ClevelandSteve]

That works, thank you.