As far as I know the current limit in Excel is 256 columns.
Most other data sources have a limited which is imposed either by the data
source (e.g. Access has a 255 column limit) or by the method used to connect
to it (typically OLEDB or ODBC)
If you create a .csv with more than around 255 columns, and try to open that
as a data source in Word 2003, the open will probably succeed, but you will
find that Word only reads around 255 of the columns at most. That is
probably because by default it uses OLEDB to open such a file. If you check
Word Tools|Options|COnfirm conversion at open, then try connecting again
(start with a fresh document), you should see an additional dialog box
titled "Confirm Data Source". Check the Show All box, and select Text Files
(*.*). You may then see an encoding dialog, which may well choose the wrong
encoding (typically it should be Windows, but UTF-8 might work OK for you
too - I don't know. You might be able to avoid some of that process by
giving the file a .txt extension instead.
Then you /might/ see a lot more columns, and possibly even all of them.
However, I do not do this regularly and according to reports it may be that
what you see depends on the number of columns and size and complexity of the
data.
To get the stuff out of Excel into a single .csv I think you will probably
have to write some Excel VBA code, or maybe you could create a new column
which used the Excel CONCAT function to concatenate all the columns into a
single new text column and export that (not something I'd particularly want
to get right!). But I don't know Excel that well and you would be better off
asking that question in an Excel group.
Peter Jamieson
