Microsoft® Office Access™ 2007 Plain & Simple

Importing Data from an XML File

It’s easy to find data analysis programs such as Access and Excel that know how to read data from text files into their native formats. Text files have a couple of important limitations, though. The first limitation is that the files don’t contain any formatting details, so any conditional formats, cell colors, or text formatting is lost when you import the data into Access. Similarly, text files don’t contain any information describing the data in the file. Sure, you can create a text file that has information about the file’s data, who created it, and so on, but Access either imports the data into the table and forces you to delete the nonsense rows, or you have to strip the data from the file before importing ...