Part III: More-Advanced Access Techniques
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One advantage of using the Import Specification dialog box is the capability to specify the type of file
to be imported from or exported to. The Language and Code Page drop-down lists determine the funda-
mental type of format. The Code Page drop-down list displays the code pages that are available for the
selected language. For example, these choices are available when Language is set to English:l (^) OEM United States
l (^) Unicode
l (^) Unicode (Big-Endian)
l (^) Unicode (UTF-7)
l (^) Unicode (UTF-8)
l (^) Western European (DOS)
l (^) Western European (ISO)
l (^) Western European (Windows)
The default for Windows installations is the Western European (Windows). You might need to set this
value if the external file is in a language that doesn’t use the Roman character set.
You can also specify the Field Delimiter option for delimited text files. Four built-in field-separator
choices (semicolon, tab, space, and comma) are available in this combo box, or you can specify
another character, if needed.
You can also specify the text qualifier used to surround text fields. Normally, text fields in a delimited
file are enclosed by characters such as quotation marks that set the text data apart from other fields. This
is useful for specifying numeric data like Social Security and phone numbers as text data rather than
numeric.
The default text qualifier is a double quotation mark. The Text Qualifier drop-down list is actually a
combo box, so you can enter a different delimiter in the text area.
When Access imports or exports data, it converts dates to a specific format (such as MMDDYY). You can
specify how date fields are to be converted, using one of the six choices in the Date Order combo box:
l (^) DMY
l (^) DYM
l (^) MDY
l (^) MYD
l (^) YDM
l (^) YMD
These choices specify the order for each portion of a date. The D is the day of the month (1–31), M is
the calendar month (1–12), and Y is the year. The default date order is set to the U.S. format (month,
day, year). When you work with European dates, the order is often changed to day, month, and year.
Using the Import Specification dialog box