Memo field not large enough

[steverossiter]

Hi and thanks,

I have a Journalist database for tracking writers from various
magazines and would like a field that could hold the text of their
articles as they are published. The Memo field would allow 65K
characters but with time even this would not provide the necessary
space.

The field need not hold graphics, although that would be nice if
possible, and I will not need to run queries against it. It is simply
to be a holding area for ongoing examples of articles they have
written.

Is this a case for an OLE field (which I have never used before)? By
embedding a Word object as a field does Access create a separate Word
document for each record or is this kept internally within the
Journalist database file?

I am running Access 2002 SP3 on XP Pro SP2.

Thanks again, Steve

 

[rico]

Yes an OLE object field is the only way do go, just attach the file of the
article, access embeds this file into the database, so no seperate files.

 

[Salad]

Hi and thanks,

I have a Journalist database for tracking writers from various
magazines and would like a field that could hold the text of their
articles as they are published. The Memo field would allow 65K
characters but with time even this would not provide the necessary
space.

The field need not hold graphics, although that would be nice if
possible, and I will not need to run queries against it. It is simply
to be a holding area for ongoing examples of articles they have
written.

Is this a case for an OLE field (which I have never used before)? By
embedding a Word object as a field does Access create a separate Word
document for each record or is this kept internally within the
Journalist database file?

I am running Access 2002 SP3 on XP Pro SP2.

Thanks again, Steve

Does your DOCUMENT really need to be stored in Access? You could make
the document a HYPERLINK and open the document in whatever format it
came in...a text file, a Word Doc, a PDF.

Baring that, you could still save the doc as a text file on the network,
wherever. Then using Open...#1 you could get the file length. If the
filelen is less than 65K, store the value to the string and into a memo.
If greater than import in chunks...show in incrments of 65K. Have a
combo to list how many chunks there are and then have the user select
the chunk.

You might be better off using a Hyperlink. Then you don't need to worry
about images etc.

 

[steverossiter]

I would normally just cut and paste the article as plain text. The only
formatting I really need to retain is to keep the sentences in their
original paragraphs.

 

[Larry Linson]

The Memo field's limit that you encountered is for text entry only; it will
hold much more if the information is stored from code -- see "Specification"
in Help.

You would have to load the OLE Object from code if you choose to use it as a
Binary Large Object (BLOB), because it is not a text field. There's some
example code for filling it with an image file in the examples at
http://accdevel.tripod.com.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP

 

[Tim Ferguson]

(e-mail address removed) wrote in @z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com:

The Memo field would allow 65K
characters but with time even this would not provide the necessary
space.

There is no limit on the size of a memo field, up to the maximum for a .mdb
file of 2GB.

There is a limit on the default Access text box control, but there are lots
of ways round this. It sounds as if you could grab the text straight off
the clipboard and use AppendChunk to put it into the field. Look up help
for GetChunk and AppendChunk.

OLE fields have huge amounts of overhead (i.e. megabytes per record, iirc)
and would be a really bad way to store this kind of information.

Hope that helps.


Tim F