Hi Antonio,

Because of the way newsgroup software handles text I can't be sure that
your sample data reaches me the way it left you. For instance, you say
the data for one patient is spread over four rows, but the sample shows
it in only four.

But it sounds as if what you have is something like this:

* a record starts with a name at the very beginning of a line.
* the first line of a record contains name and number, separated by two
or more spaces (or maybe one or more tab characters).
* subsequent lines of a record each contain one field, preceded by
multiple spaces or tabs.
* every record contains the same number of lines in the same order.

There are several ways to tackle this, including

1) search and replace, using a text editor or word processor that can do
wildcard searches. The general idea would be

a) delete all the trailing spaces (i.e. replace each instance of
   [spaces + linebreak] with just [linebreak])

b) replace each instance of [linebreak + spaces] with [tab]

c) replace each remaining instance of [more than one space] with [tab]

The result will be a tab-delimited text file that Access can import.

2) write a little program in your favourite language to do the same sort
of processing as (1) above. Here's how it can be done in Perl:

#start of code
while (<>) {                     #read input line by line
  s/\s+$// ;                    #trim trailing whitespace
   
  if (m/^\w/) {                 #no leading whitespace: new record
     print "$record\n" if $record;  #print previous record, if any
     s/ {2,}/\t/g;                  #replace spaces with tab
     $record = $_;                  #start accumulating new record
  } else {                    
     s/^\s+//;                  #trim leading whitepace
     $record .= "\t$_" ;        #concatenate tab and field value
   }  
}
print "$record\n";               #print last record
#end of code

3) write VBA code to read the text file line by line, assemble records
and append them directly to your table. IMHO this is only worth doing if
you need to automate the import process.

--
John Nurick [Microsoft Access MVP]

Please respond in the newgroup and not by email.