Before we discuss how to convert a WordPad file in to MS Access 2003 lets try doing something interesting. Type “ABCDEFGHIJKLM” or you can copy it from here and paste it in an excel spreadsheet. Now type “A B C D E F G H I J K L M” and again copy it and paste in excel. Please note that in second set of text I have separated every letter by a tab space. What difference did you notice? The first string got pasted in one single cell in excel but in second case every character got pasted in a different cell. Why did this happen? This happened because in first string there was no space between the characters and so they were considered as one word by the database program Excel. In second case each word was separated by a Tab and this Tab worked a s delimiter and so each character was treated separately and so was moved to separate cells. This is the base of how the import feature of any database program works. If we separate the fields of any table by some fixed or predefined delimiter then it can be easily understood by the database and can be easily imported. We even can create the entire database in a WordPad file and later we can import it in any database application like Excel or MS Access. This is how the CSV files are created and understood by various database applications including MS Access. A CSV file has got each value separated by a comma and so such a file is called CSV file which stands for Comma Separated Values.
In this article we will tell you how to import the data from a WordPad file into MS Access. A similar situation which we discussed above but this time it will be done not as an example but with real data. Open the WordPad file and enter the data in it. Save this file as a text file by going to the File menu and selecting Save As. From the Save As box’s file type drop down, select .txt and save the file. Close this file and close the WordPad application as well if you want. Now open the Microsoft Access database application. Open a new database or the one into which you want to fetch the data from the WordPad file. Once open, click on the File menu and choose Get External Data. After this click on Import from the list. Click on the drop down arrow which is next to the Files of Type drop down and select Text files so that only text files gets listed. Select the text file you created in WordPad and click on Import. Now MS access will ask you the delimiter type. It could be a fixed width or delimited data. Make the proper choice and continue with the import. This ways you can import the data you have in your WordPad’s text file in an MS Access database.
