Hi Guys,

I have written a report in an Access DB that uses data from an Excel SS. To read the data, I have created an external link to the XL worksheet.

The problem is that one of the columns has numbers in the first few rows but later rows contain alpha charaters as well and this field should be a text field, however when ever I link to the worksheet, Access always treats this column as a number field and the records that contain the alpha characters display as errors.

Does anyone know how to force Access to treat this column as a text field?

If you import the data, the import wizard detects it as text, but the spreadsheet will change from time to time and I don't want to have to keep importing each time it changes.

Any ideas?

TIA

Alan