Importing data from an excel spreadsheet that has numbers in the first several rows causes access to override my field selection as "text". As I understand the problem this has been a known issue for access for some time. Is there anyway to set something in my db to prevent this from happening? office 2010. I have read the Microsoft work around of inserting a (false data)text record in the first row of the data but this is far from ideal. Data is being downloaded in excel format dozens of times an hour and imported to the db. Having to do the extra step of creating false data greatly hinders what could be a very easy user friendly process. Is there any way to override this bad behaivior? I am not a coder by any means but I am beginning to suspect unless I learn vb there is no way around this bug. any suggestions welcome. Please keep in mind I am not a coder and somewhat new to access.