Importing a CSV file in MS-Access March 26, 2008
Posted by anand in Tech, What I learned today.trackback
Question of the day – How do you import a CSV file in MS-Access, to edit and save it?
Answer – It is not as easy as you guys think. When you import a CSV file in MS-Access, it “links” a table to the underling CSV file in a Read-only mode. There is no way you can edit it and then save it back.
But here is a neat trick to make it editable – First you need to create an empty table with just columns and no data. A really quick way to create the table beforehand is to open the csv file and delete all data except for the header row. Now save it as a different csv file. Import the newly saved file and Access will create an empty table from it. Now import the real CSV file into that table. Access will bring (read – import) in all the data and will let you edit it.
Anand instead of going through all the trouble just use OpenOffice
Spreadsheet it has an option to import csv files and edit the data. On the other hand i would like to know why do you want to use MS-Access ?
Like most microsoft products it is not standards compliant.
OO Spreadsheet has the same limitation as Excel – max number of rows that can be imported. You cannot import/edit a file having more than 65535 rows. My CSV contained over 100,000 rows.
The reason we used MS-Access was to create a “form” layout over the CSV data, where in we could show one row of data at a time. We really didn’t need any of the ACID (database) properties. Just needed a way to modify some of the data and then export it back as a CSV file.
Hi anand,
i have imported to csv files into ms-access but i want to know how can i compae two csv files in ms-access…..i need the ans asap..thank u
i have imported to csv files into ms-access but i want to know how can i compae two csv files in ms-access…..i need the ans asap..thank u