In some of the MS Access databases that you develop, there may be a need to import data from text files, also referred to as ASCII files or flat files. Let’s look at the menu methods available to you.
Under the File menu, there is an entry named “Get External Data”, and then “Import…”. The extra “…” indicates that when you choose that entry, a dialogue box will appear on the screen to ask you for further details.
The next step is to change the “Files of type:” entry to show “Text Files (*.txt;*.csv;*.tab;*.asc)”. A good habit is to always use the .txt extension for text files. Thus, they will appear under that choice and you can quickly look for the file you want to import.
Generally speaking, your text files should either have their “fields” separated by a delimiter (usually a comma or a tab, but can also be a space, semicolon, or any other chosen character), or they may be in fixed widths where each field always takes the exact same space in each record.
Let’s look at the delimited style first. The fields will be automatically sensed by Access as per the...
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