Best way to read an Excel file into an Access database

Question

What's the "best" way to read (just read) an Excel file from within an Access 2007 application. I only want to loop trough the rows and put the data into an Access table.

I don't want a manually import (Get External Data dialog) but by VBA. The user gets a Form with a Browse button and then points to a Excel file with a defined content/format. After that the VBA code reads the data and puts it into the Access database.

Answer 1

You could try the DoCmd.TransferSpreadsheet method.

DoCmd.TransferSpreadsheet acImport, , "from_excel","C:\Access\demo.xls", True

That imports spreadsheet data into a table named from_excel, and assumes the first row of the spreadsheet contains field names. See Access help for TransferSpreadsheet or online here, for more details.

Answer 2

If you want to read the entire spreadsheet in, you can import an Excel spreadsheet directly into Access. See here or here.

You can also choose to link to the Excel spreadsheet instead of importing it. That way any changes to the Excel spreadsheet will be reflected in the linked table. However, you won't be able to make changes from within Access.

A third option is to write some VBA code within Access to open a recordset and read the spreadsheet in. See the answers from KeithG in this thread. You can do something like this to open the spreadsheet in VBA:

Dim xl As Excel.Application
Dim xlsht As Excel.Worksheet
Dim xlWrkBk As Excel.Workbook

Set xl = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
Set xlWrkBk = GetObject("H:/ggg.xls")
Set xlsht = xlWrkBk.Worksheets(1)

Answer 3

Try something like this:

Dim excelApp As Excel.Application
Dim workbook As Excel.Workbook
Dim worksheet As Excel.Worksheet

Set excelApp = CreateObject("Excel.application")
Set workbook = excelApp.Open("C:\someFileName.xls")
Set worksheet = workbook.Worksheets(1)

And then loop through the rows and columns, pull the data from the cells, and insert it into the database. (You can use the worksheet.cells method.) Try searching on google for code samples.