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Pulling It All Together

Are you one of those people who starts a database, uses it for a month or so, and then later abandons it in favor of creating a better database? Yeah, me too. It's time we faced the fact that this love-em-and-leave-em database method is counterproductive. Access makes it easy for us to import the data we've already entered--in Access, dBASE (III thru 5), Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, Paradox (remember that?), XML documents, or plain ol' text files.

This means that if you've entered and saved data electronically, you don't have to waste your time re-entering it. Create a new database (or open the one you want to add the data to) and choose Get External Data from the File menu. Select Import, navigate to the file you want to import (choose the format in the Files of type field if the data isn't in Access format), select the file and click Import. In the Import dialog box, click the items you want to import. (You can choose tables, forms, queries, and so on--whatever you created for the other database. To select everything at once, click Select All.) Click Import to finish the job, and Access adds the existing file as a new table in the selected database. Isn't that simple? And it's a great way to pull together all those "favorite movie" databases we created in the 80s. Who knows? Bad-and-ugly trivia might come back into style. :) k