Originally Posted by
Cottonshirt
without examining both your Excel spreadsheet and your ACCESS table it is difficult to be sure, but:
first: during Import, ACCESS has a habit of interpreting the first record in the spreadsheet as the data type for the field rather than adhering to whatever you said it was. so I would actually look at the table in Design View and see what ACCESS says the field is.
next: my next guess would be that the field does not just contain the text you want but also includes a delimeter character or a control character of some kind imported from Excel. when you edited a field this extra character was lost and so ACCESS no longer views this record in quite the same way. I would be tempted to run some queries asking for right([field name],1) and VarType([field name]) to confirm your belief that the field really is short text and that it contains only the text you want in there. and pay particular attention to the record giving you problems and make sure all its properties and returns are the same as the other records.
third: if you are sure it is text, run some queries experimenting with a variety of other text functions to see if the field actually behaves the way text should. try Trim(), concatenation with &, StrComp(), InStr() and others. this will usually highlight what ACCESS thinks of the field.
many thanks,
Cottonshirt