Posted by
Andy Brown on 13 January 2012 | 2 comments
Reading and Writing Text Files using TextStreams
This blog shows how to read from (and write to) text files using something
called TextStream objects.
There is another way to do this in VBA using commands like Input
and Open, but I think the way shown here is much easier to
remember and use.
In order to get any of the code in this blog to work, you first need to create a FileSystemObject.
Reply from Andy Brown (blog author)
My advice would be to get SQL Server Express, which you can install as a standalone package on your laptop if you choose, and which - best of all - is free. However, I believe that SQL Server Management Studio (the client tool) is available as a free download also.
If you do get the data into a database (which sounds a good idea), you can also write VBA to link to this from within Excel or any other MS application by referencing the ActiveX Data Objects object library. Unfortunately I haven't got round to writing this blog, but if you Google "Link to ADO using VBA" you should find the answer. Using this, you could just use Access. Typically the problems you get with this are with the user interface side, so providing you've got no more than 100,000 or so records and only a few people accessing the data simultaneously, you should be OK.
Reply from Andy Brown (blog author)
Definitely SQL Server, then! Good luck. My colleague Andrew has written a blog on
downloading the Express edition.