Copy and Paste vs Import Wizard

[Paul H]

I've run into this problem before. I have a text file created from an Excel spreadsheet. Using the text wizard I get the error below, but I can copy and paste (from Excel) without any errors. It is a tab delimited text file with no headers.

What am I missing?

[JoeM]

Do you have a header, trailer, any extra rows or columns in your Text File that might be messing it up (because they would violate your field data types or rules)?

[Paul H]

possibly, but I don't know how to find it.I sure don't see anything, but I might try importing this directly from Excel and see how that goes. I'll get back to you tomorrow.

[JoeM]

possibly, but I don't know how to find it.I sure don't see anything,

Should be fairly easy to tell, just open your text file in a Text Editor and take a look at it.
Check out the first row. Are there column header/titles? If you, you need to account for that in your import (or remove them).
Check out the last row. Is there a footer row (maybe of totals) or extra blank lines at the bottom?
Check out the end of a few records. Does it end directly after the last field, or are there extra tabs?

Those are some of the things you might want to look for.

If importing directly from Excel, I would recommend naming the range you want to import in Excel, then when you import, select the option that lets you import by named range instead of sheet name.

[Paul H]

I just opened the text file and it is ugly. It has formatted dollar signs in it which I believe is blowing up the import. I wasn't expecting that. I'll need to remove all formatting before saving as text.

I just made some changes that worked. I had to format the money columns as general, but leave the date formatting on my date column. Live and learn.

Thank you for pointing the way.

Paul