Hello,

First post, great resource! Glad I found it...

I'm having a problem, I'm trying to import some text into a virgin database for further analysis. I'll save the hard stuff for later. For now all I want to do is import a block of text into a field. Sounds easy right...FileMaker seems to break it into 175+ different fields on import. I can likely make some calc to add filed one to field two and such but I'd just like to import it clean. The file is a regular text file, exported from Quark. It has a long paragraph of text followed by a carriage return followed by a long paragraph of text... several thousand. The paragraphs are long, very long, like a full page of text but there are no extra returns or line breaks. I don't understand why FMP is making it into separate fields.

Any help would be appreciated! Thanks.

A carriage return is a "line separator", which imports as a record. Otherwise FileMaker could not import tab and comma-separated files. To import an "only text" file, you need to use the Import Records, Folder command, then check the [x] Text files option. You have to put your text files in a folder first.

Thanks for your help, I just tried that and It puts all the text into one field - a different problem than before.

I realize that the carriage return separates records, that is exactly what I want it to do...and it is seeing each record correctly. The problem is that the text in that record should all be poured into one field, FMP is putting it into hundreds of fields for some unknown reason. Many are incredibly short, like 2 or three characters.

Maybe it's commas breaking it up. Try importing specifically as tab-delimited.

OMG! I think I'm going to have to award myself the idiot of the week award. That seems to have solved it!

Thanks!