Customizing Links to linked Excel data

[bigmike]

I'm a noobie to AccessForums so let me say hello to everyone.

I'm an occasional Access user, certainly no expert and most of my Access projects have been small and not very complex. I've inherited a very large and complex Excel spreadsheet that is a single workbook that contains about eighty worksheets. I would like to link some of the worksheets to Access, and write some queries and reports to get a better view of the data stored in the spreadsheets. I want to link to Excel, no import, so Access will always have current data. What I am wondering, is there any way to customize the links in Access to my Excel data so I'm not pulling in an entire worksheet to my linked tables in Access ? For example, most of the Excel worksheets have a range of data like A5:BA255. I only need the data from columns A, B and BA. Everything in between is historical data and won't be used in Access but so far, linking seems to pull in the entire worksheet without giving me the option of selecting which columns I want. I can hide the unused columns in Access if I have to but would prefer to streamline the links back to Excel if that's possible. Updating my Access tables can be pretty slow but if it was linking to few columns I was thinking that would speed it up. Thanks

[June7]

Should be able to link to a named range but I expect the columns must be contiguous. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ac...x#BMlinktodata

[bigmike]

Thanks for the response June7, I think you gave me the info I needed. None of my named ranges were showing up when I would create the link in Access so I was using the whole worksheet. Now I see that only named ranges with contiguous columns show up in the list of named ranges in the Access link wizard. Still, this gives me something good to work with that I wasn't aware of before. Ill create two named ranges with contiguous columns instead of trying to do it with a single one that didn't have contiguous columns. Ill mark this as solved and thanks again.

(How do I mark it solved ?)

[June7]

Thread Tools dropdown above first post.