Help! How to move MS Works database with long-text field to Access?

[RobertW56]

I have spent many, many hours on this problem.



I have over 4,000 records in an MS Works database file (2008 version). One field contains lengthy notes in unformated text. That field is often a few paragraphs long - hundreds if not thousands of characters long. I know Access has a Memo field type that could recieve the long text. However, all techniques I found or tried for conversion only move the text data in Works to a 256 character field in Access. Thus most of the data is lost.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[RuralGuy]

Can you post the MS Works db with at least 1 sample record so we can play? Remove any sensitive data of course then zip it up for attachment.

[RobertW56]

Can you post the MS Works db with at least 1 sample record so we can play? Remove any sensitive data of course then zip it up for attachment.

The MS Works file is zipped and uploaded. It has 10 records. View it in Forms view and you'll get a better idea of how I'm using it.

Thanks a million for your efforts.

[alansidman]

http://www.mydigitallife.info/conver...rks-installed/

Read this

[RobertW56]

http://www.mydigitallife.info/conver...rks-installed/

Read this

Thanks for that. I've actually tried that. What I find is that these methods only allow you to convert the long text field to a 256 character field. It drops off anything longer than 256 character. Thus I lose most of my text when it's hundreds or thousands of characters long. Maybe I'm missing something. I'd love to have a solution other than having to retype these thousands of pages of notes.

[RuralGuy]

Will Works export to a dbf file?

[RobertW56]

Will Works export to a dbf file?

The most current version does not "save as" to a dbf file. It's only types are a) it's own format (wdb), b) text and tabs (txt) and comma delimited (csv). Seems I recall reading about it exporting to d-base format, but didn't think d-base had a field type that accommodated long-text.

[RuralGuy]

So both the csv and txt format truncate the big field?

[RobertW56]

FIXED IT!!! Thanks for your help. I think I finally was able to get Excel to read the file and not truncate the long text bringing it in as a CSV file. I've tried this before, and frankly can't recall what I did differently this time, but it read it without any data loss that I can detect.

[RuralGuy]

Excellent! Thanks for posting back with your success. Go ahead and use the Thread Tool at the top of the thread and mark this thread as Solved.

[RobertW56]

You were a bigger help than you may realize. Having me remove all but a few records from the database and working with a much smaller set made it much easier to experiment. Thank you.

Seems the thread is already in "solved" status.

[RuralGuy]

I marked the thread for you. Sometimes all you need is a sounding board to solve problems. Glad I was there.