<OT> M$ Access rant and bug warning

["Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom" <carls@agritech.com>]

        am at this moment trying to get some data out of an Access query,
and put it in some sort of vaguely portable format. (with marginal success)
        this brings up the issue that 
*** You have no guarantees what Access will output ****

serious bug: If you try to export the data in a report to a .txt file;
Access will spontaneously _"lose"_ every fourth record. this is a completely
repeatable problem I have with Access 97; and it's cost the company a few
thousand $ on one occasion. :(
        if you output to an .rtf file; it will keep all the data, but will
choose a font for it *AT RANDOM*. (of course, it'll usually be one of the
exotic, hard to read ones).

right now; I have a Select query that outputs 559 records. I tried exporting
it to an Excel spreadsheet (which one would think is a common; easy thing
that Office should do perfectly..)
        somehow the spreadsheet now as 640 records in it. ;<
        and they're not sorted in the order that they were in the query
output. ;(
        ah, found the problem.... it didn't exclude "some" of the records
that I told the query to exclude. ~~;< (steaming from ears).

oh, btw; this is on SR-_*2*_ of Office 97. ~~~~;<

argh.
it's this sort of thing that *really* makes me hate M$ with a passion.

Carl Soderstrom
System Administrator    307 Brighton Ave. 
Minnesota DHIA	        Buffalo, MN	
carls@agritech.com      (612) 682-1091