Increasing Memo Field Capacity

[PC User]

Access 97 has a limit to the amount of text that a memo field will hold to a maximum of 64,000 characters. I have some rather large documents that I need to store and I need to increase the capacity of my memo fields. Can memo fields be concatenated like strings? I read in an access reference book that entering text via VB code can boost the memo field's capacity to 2 billion characters, but it didn't explain how to do it. Can anyone help me on this? Thanks.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

You might eventually run into other problems. It is better to perhaps just store links to the documents than the documents themselves. You don't mention your level of expertise so I'm reluctant to go deeper in this. But the issue of database size will almost surely become an issue VERY QUICKLY if you actually try to store your documents inside the database. If you just LINK to them, on the other hand, it wouldn't be so bad.

In Access Help, look up topic "DataType Property" and read up on the OLE Object data type. Then just link to that file when you need it. Saves space. Saves database loading time. Prevents duplication of data on the disk. Allows you to edit the file even after you have linked to it. (As long as the name doesn't change...)

Note that you cannot build an index on an OLE field.

So if you want to look up something, you have to have another field that holds what you want for search purposes.