Linking to an Excel spreadsheet

[Seth Schwarm]

I recently successfully created a table link to a spreadsheet. However, one
field had serious problems. The zip code field. The other fields were name
and address info.

No matter what I tried by formatting the zip code field as text and
relinking it into Access, I could not get it to display the values. Instead,
it displayed some type of error syntax.

Is there a way to link to data stored in Excel without having to import the
data and abandon Excel entirely?

 

[John Nurick]

The dummy row usually solves the problem when importing, but not
necessarily when linking, because for some reason the rules apply
differently then.

One reliable approach is to prefix each value in the zip code column
with an apostrophe. This forces Excel to treat them as text. The
apostrophe's aren't displayed in the Excel sheet or linked into Access.

Otherwise, for details of how field types are intepreted when linking or
importing from Excel and what you can do to contol it, see
http://www.dicks-blog.com/excel/2004/06/external_data_m.html
and http://support.microsoft.com/?id=257819