Many thanks for your reply. I was trying to convert a series of Excel reports on royalties over severla years into an Access database. After cleaning the data on the first right I selected Get external data from Access; pulled in the data and on review decided I needed to make further changes. I therefore deleted all the records in the database; went back into Excel and completed the cleaning. When selecteing Get external data to pull in the data anew I got the error message. After fiddling around for several hours I deleted the database altogether and started again from scratch but now each time I try to import the Excel data I get the same error message. It seems I have somehow corrupted Access. The data is too big to be entered manually. I had no knowledge of ADP until this incident. There seem to be several ADP files on the PC, all created at the same time. I tried to create a new one but was blown away by what it was asking for and managed to restore a previous one on opening it but always to no avail. any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
