Chances are you have some data in the missing records that don't fit within the schema that Access associates with each field - it only scans the first hundred or so rows to decide what kind of data type to assume. For example, you may have some character data in a field that Access thinks is numeric, or you may have a date field outside the range that is legal in Excel. On the other hand, if you import it into an existing table, you define the field types, and that allows it to import. I've done a good deal of this kind of thing, in some cases with multi-million rows, and the import will find and flag data that is invalid, where linking doesn't give you as much info.