You have now supplied all the information needed to set up the specification; the next steps, where
you save the specification, are new to Access 2007.Clicking the Finish button opens a new Save Import Steps screen (shown in Figure 10.7).
If you check the “Save import steps” checkbox, more controls appear on the dialog,
where you can enter the name and description of the saved import specification, and even create an
Outlook task to run it automatically at a specified interval.FIGURE 10.7
Saving an import specification.Clicking the Save Import button saves the import specification. This allows you to select the saved
specification and run it in the future from the Saved Imports button on the External Data tab of the
Ribbon (shown in Figure 10.1), which saves a lot of time compared with going through all the
steps of the wizard each time you want to do the import.Unfortunately, Access 2007 VBA code doesn’t recognize saved specifications. This fea-
ture worked for several previous versions, but at present it is broken, so we must wait
for a patch or service pack to fix it. For now, only code that avoids using specifications will work.
(You can import from, or export to, a comma-delimited file without a specification, but not a fixed-
width file.)The Manage Data Tasks screen is shown in Figure 10.8. It has two tabs, one for saved imports and
the other for saved exports. On each tab, you can select a saved specification to run.CAUTION CAUTION
NEW FEATURENEW FEATURE
Part II Writing VBA Code to Exchange Data between Office Components