I have some very 'wide' fixed format files to import (up to 450 fields). The import wizard requires the steady hand and sharp eyes of a 20 year old to get the column positions right. Sadly I am no longer a steady, sharp eyed 20 year old and find this task a serious pain! I'm upgrading from Access so I have the import spec. My question - has anyone found a way of setting up a DTS import package with column start positions as 'parameters'. I've looked at bcp, but it seems to assume delimited files.

Thanks

A suggestion you make consider

Create a linked server to your access database, insert the records into your new SQL Database.



Jaime E. Maccou

Thanks for your suggestion Jaime.
I had a solution from another forum which is to create a table for import with one big field, then use a view with substring's to unpack the data. This worked OK as I was able to clipboard copy the column names, start positions and widths from the Access import spec, then edit in SQL Analyser to make a Create View statement.