import content from ms access 2000 database

  • Joe Greenwood

    (@jgreenwood)


    13 years, 10 months ago

    Hello, I am moving a website to WordPress from a Microsoft ASP or ASP .NET structure, and I was given a DVD with the website’s “article” or “post” content (it is a guitar magazine website) saved in a Microsoft Access 2000 database file. There are approximately 3000 article posts in this database.

    I am wondering, is there an efficient way to convert this database to PHP and MySQL, and import this content to WordPress?

    I am a novice to MySQL, have run a few commands in some instances, and can follow step-by-step instructions. I am hosting with DreamHost. Any help is much appreciated.

    Joe Greenwood
    Grand Forks, ND

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • esmi

    (@esmi)

    13 years, 10 months ago

    As far as I’m aware, there’s no way to import directly from an Access db. You can, however, import content from a CSV or Excel file.

    Thread Starter Joe Greenwood

    (@jgreenwood)

    13 years, 10 months ago

    Thanks for the reply, esmi … I did previously try CSV Importer plugin (by Denis Kobozev) and it worked very well … but then I went back to my MS Access database file and saw I hadn’t imported all of the tables, and didn’t see any way to export them all as one CSV from the Microsoft Access desktop application … and so that is why I turned to this forum to find if there was a known way to convert and upload the entire database as one whole unit …

    I do think, though, that my best option will be to export each of the Access database tables as individual Excel documents, and then invest the time to merge them and make them clean and organized into a single CSV for Kobozev’s CSV Importer plugin.

    And so that is what I will do. Thank you!

    Thread Starter Joe Greenwood

    (@jgreenwood)

    13 years, 9 months ago

    Well this was very much a chore, but I have success!

    I was provided the Microsoft Access database file on a DVD by the previous webmaster company, and using a Microsoft Access software (same name as database file type), was able to export each of the database tables as a CSV. I then opened each of the dozen or so CSVs in Microsoft Excel, merge them one by one according to a shared field, until I have one huge XLS workbook spreadsheet. Each CSV from the original database shared at least one common field in a linear chain, so this was possible.

    It took much formatting of the data to eliminate non-ASCII characters and make sure fields properly open and close (because commas and quotation marks upset the CSV). Also each article post was broken into several database rows in the original document, so there was much merging of rows involved there. Also, every article post has images throughout, and I needed a way to let these flow with the body text of the articles, and so I inserted HTML tags to create image and caption divs.

    Then I had to make columns conform to new WordPress database, and give meaningful names to those extra columns that still had useful data but did not conform to the Kobozev’s CSV Importer plugin.

    Finally once my XLS workbook spreadsheet was ready with nearly 3000 articles, I export in small batches to CSVs, and upload with Kobozev’s CSV Importer plugin.

    Success!

    Thank you to Kobozev’s CSV Importer plugin, and to all who make WordPress so grand!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘import content from ms access 2000 database’ is closed to new replies.