Access 2003 -- Importing Text File -- Nulls

[Debris]

Hello,

I'm importing a tab-delimited text file into Access 2003, containing about
30 fields and up to 13,000 records. The file is an export from a well-known
enterprise software application.

Some of the fields have no value, or a blank value (in other words, choices
A, B, C, and 'blank' are all legitimate).

From what I've read, Access sees this 'blank' as two tabs in a row and
interprets this as a Null at import. However, I don't want them as Nulls --
they're not Nulls / unknowns, but blanks / zero-length strings. (This only
applies to my text fields; numerical fields seem to always have a value.)

(I'm thinking of the "middle-name" example: the person's middle name is not
unknown; rather they have no middle name.)

What's the best means of dealing with this:
Should I condition / modify the text file before importing, and if so,
what's the best way to do this?
Should I update the data in Access? What's the best way of doing this? I'm
fairly good at building queries in Design view but am a novice programmer.
I'm familiar with the Nz function but I haven't figured out how to apply it
to all fields/records.

Many Thanks,

D

P. S. My apologies if I've asked a long-winded question about a topic with
an easy fix, but I've worn out Google looking for help...

 

[Jerry Whittle]

While you are correct about the difference between nulls and ZLS, I'd rather
just leave them import as nulls. Why? You look are some records in a table
and see some blank fields. What are these? Nulls, ZLS, maybe someone just
typed in Spaces.

So to find out you need to test for all three. If you can rule out ZLS's,
you only need to check for nulls and spaces (and spaces would be pretty rare).