Quote Originally Posted by mpearce
Data within the cells in excel is small probably under 50 characters so a text data type should be fine, right? anyway for testing i changed the data type to memo and that seemed to work. but somehow blank rows get inserted as either the first or last record which was throwing an error due to a primary key constraint violation.

basically i need a primary key so i can relate the tables on account number so i can run the join query and find the duplicate account numbers in DecoOpen and DecoOpen (2) for example and then put the results of that query into a report.
No. This query returns all account_num values which exist in both DecoOpen and DecoOpen (2). I don't have any relationships defined, and account_num is not a primary key for either table:

SELECT a.account_num
FROM DecoClosed AS a INNER JOIN [DecoClosed (2)] AS b ON a.account_num = b.account_num;

Depending on the specifics of your project it might make more sense to drop relationship, primary key, or other constraints before importing from Excel. Then do any needed cleansing on the imported data and programatically re-create necessary constraints.

It will be a whole lot easier to figure all this stuff out if we can see samples of the database and spreadsheets you're working with!

Hans