Importing tab delimited files without spec

[AndrewAfresh]

Is there any way to use docmd.transfertext to import tab delimited files without specifying an import spec? I can’t use specs as I receive many files to import with different columns in each. I want to import these files to one table, do some reporting on it, delete the table and then do the next file.

[orange]

Not sure without an import spec. Here's a link, but it uses a spec.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...ccess-database

[Rawb]

Not using DoCmd.TransferText.

The only way I know of to do this is to write a VBA Function to import the file. I've had to do something like this before though, and it's not really all that hard. In fact, the only real issue I ran into was knowing when to import double quotes and when not to.

Or you could re-save the file as an spreadsheet in an Excel Workbook and then import that. If you're dealing with a lot of file though, you'll probably want to come up with a way of batch saving the files so you don't have to manually do it one file at a time.

[JoeM]

I did some playing around, and I think I found one way to get it to work with the TransferText option, but it may not work for you.

First determine the most number of columns your file may have. Then create a table that has that many columns, and format them all the same (probably to Text).
Then, import your file with the most columns and create your Import Specification off of that.
Then any file that has that many columns, or less, should be able to be imported using TransferText with the Import Specification you set up.

The downside is that all your field values will be the same format (i.e. Text), so if you really have a mixture of text, number, and date fields (that you really need formatted differently for your report purposes), you would need to do some data conversions after your import.

[AndrewAfresh]

Thank you very much, I shall investigate the options you suggest