Question : TransferSpreadsheet Action Failed - Weird Problem???

This is a question where I think I've found the "What"  in the spreadsheet that's causing the TransferSpreadsheet Action to fail when importing into Access and I'm trying to find an explanation as to "Why" this only happens on some machines running Office 2000.

I have an Access 2000 db which has a pretty simple import function that imports 7 Excel Worksheets into a route table using a macro.  This has worked for the past several years and a few days ago the users reported they started getting the Action Failed dialog box and it always stops on the same worksheet (the 5th one down in the macro).  I looked at the worksheet in question and imported it here in my development environment and it works perfectly.  The client's IT support employee can also run the import from his workstation and it also works perfectly and when he tries to run the import from one of the users machines the macro stops with the Action Failed dialog box displayed on the same worksheet.  Made a new workbook and moved all the sheets from the old workbook to the new workbook and same problem.

I started checking all the columns including the formats in the worksheet that causes the Action Failed and I noticed in that sheet the Route_Number field has the first 8 rows formatted as General and the remaining 21 rows formatted as Text.   All the other 6 worksheets has all rows in the field formatted as Text.  I believe this is the problem in that each row in the route_number field should be formatted as Text but why would the import work on some machines and not the others???

I imagine there's some type of translation that happens and with the first 6 rows formatted as General and the text in the field is numbers (something like 11061) maybe that column starts out being translated as numeric and when it hits the 7th row the format is now Text so this causes a problem, just my guess right now.  Also, the destination field in the table the worksheet is being imported into is Text.

Again, the question is  ....  Why would the import work on some machines and fail on others???  Could it be a Service Pack type issue where later or updated versions of Office 2000 would handle that situation differently???  I would have thought the TransferSpreadsheet Action would fail each time under those circumstances but as mentioned earlier, I can import the worksheet as it is here with no problems.  It's just some of the client's machine will get this error.

Thanks,

ET

Answer : TransferSpreadsheet Action Failed - Weird Problem???

I suspect your problem is related to this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257819
See particularly the section titled:
"Considerations That Apply to Both OLE DB Providers
A Caution about Mixed Data Types"
about a third of the way down. It may be that some machines have registry entries that others do not.
Regards,
Rory