Originally Posted by
JoeM
I have also encountered issues in the past, especially when importing Excel files into Access. The big problem is that Excel and Access "talk to each other" and try figure out the format of each field on their own (I believe it looks at the values in the first 10 records, or something like that). Sometimes, it guesses wrong. And, as you saw and Allan mentioned, Access error reporting is greatly lacking in some areas.
Often times, to get around some of the issues presented by Excel to Access imports, I will export my Excel file to a text file (usually CSV) and then import that text file, where the Import Wizard is invoked and I can tell Access exactly how I want each field formatted. It often works quite well, though I don't know if it would help for your illegal characters issue, unless you formatted that field as Text.