I'm linking to an Oracle table via ODBC (I'm doing this 'manually', not through VBA code).

There is a field in the Oracle table of type VARCHAR2(100). MS Access has taken it upon itself to assign a data type of MEMO to this field instead of TEXT. This is very limiting - there are things that MS Access just won't let you do with a Memo field.

How can I pursuade Access to use the TEXT data type fo this field?

You have no control over how Jet interprets data types in linked tables. If you can, your best bet is to cange the Oracle data type to one that Access recognizes as text.

Many thanks for your reply. Luckily I was able to reduce the size of the Oracle field to VARCHAR2(50) which Access then interpretted as a text field.

Text fields can be up to 255 characters and Oracle has several different text datatypes. You just have to choose the correct one.

Another option to look into is to use different ODBC Drivers. I understand that there are more than one Oracle driver, one made by Microsoft and other by Oracle (and maybe then some more). Maybe one driver may be more accurate in translating the data types...