working with 2 datatypes in field?

[scott]

I have a table with employee numbers...its actually an excel file that
I link to a table...if an employee does not have an employee # the
user puts the persons name....

it looks like this.

123456
325456
dave
scott
326477

I tried to change to the type to general or text in excel but when I
link it, it still brings it in as numeric.

I want to create a query that pulls out all names and leaves the
employee numbers in there...

How can I do this?

If I run it, it will look like.


dave
scott

thanks
scott

 

[John Vinson]

I tried to change to the type to general or text in excel but when I
link it, it still brings it in as numeric.

Since Excel doesn't have "strong typing", Access must guess the
datatype of the field based on the first few records. One solution is
to put a nonnumeric value (real or dummy) in the first row of the
spreadsheet, to force Access to see the field as text rather than
numeric.