Importing Excel data, with more than 255 Characters

• Thom A

  SSC Guru

  Points: 99126

  More actions

  March 27, 2015 at 8:38 am

  #296343

  Hi All,

  I'm hoping someone might be able to point me to a solution in regards to importing data from an Excel file that has some cells with more than 255 characters.

  After having a read a few articles online, it seems that the SSIS Excel Source checks the first 8 rows of the Excel file and then uses those to decide the max length of that column. Unfortunately I have rows further down the file with have quite a few more than 255 characters, so I'm truncating more than 200 characters in some fields.

  One solution has been to mvoe the records to the top, however, the document comes from outside the company and is meant to be loaded automatically when it parses through our SFTP client, so someone going in and changing the file isn't really ideal.

  Are there any other solutions to force SSIS to realise that the data has more characters than it thinks it does?

  Many thanks for any help.

  Thom

  Thom~

  Excuse my typos and sometimes awful grammar. My fingers work faster than my brain does.
  Larnu.uk

• Eirikur Eiriksson

  SSC Guru

  Points: 182882

  More actions

  March 29, 2015 at 4:07 am

  #1787156

  Check out this excellent article by Koen Verbeeck What’s the deal with Excel & SSIS?[/url]

  😎