I'm hesitant to go down the path of using ADO to query the text file because of the Jet engine not playing nice on 64 bit machines and this application will be running on that. However it does look like I could query the fields I only desired and that would cut my field count less than 255 avoiding the import error we are facing. Thoughts? Thanks for the comments jonh

I tried altering what winxmun provided (thanks by the way) and could not get the record delimiter working.

If you change the file extension from .txt to .csv and open using it splits fields appropriately. Using DoCmd.TransferText acImportDelim doesn't all you to specify ranges for the import. Is there another way or does that go back to using ADO to query the file?