Importing table to geodatabase, data type fail

[JamesHarrington]

Hello
I'm trying to impoort an excel table into a personal geodatabase. One of the fields has a mix of numeric and non-numeric values. Even when I set the type of this field to 'text', and its length to way more than the longest value, it still only imports the numeric values and tosses all the non-numeric ones. I can fake it out by adding a character to the numeric values, but this is not a good solution. Any  ideas? thanks!

[JamesHarrington]

ArcGIS 10.2.1
.xls file (xlsx never works with any version of Arcgis, always get error: "Failed to connect to database. An underlying database error occurred. Class not registered")

My quick solution was to add a text field, copy all values from original field, adding a "_" character to all numeric values. Import table to GDB, edit in ArcView, copy all non numeric values from new field back to original one (where they were thrown out) and delete new field.

But the import tool should import text fields as text in the first place!!!!!!!

[JamesHarrington]

The solution:

Sort data in reverse order, so text based records are on top before exporting. Apparently, ESRI ignores what the data type is set to, and makes an assumption based on the type of the first record.

[JoeBorgione]

James-  in the import dialog, take a closer look at the Field Map (optional) window pane.  Here you can right click on the source field name, select properties, and instruct the utility the desired type to import.  So, it may be a text file that is a string of numbers that you want to import as integer and so forth.

Hope this helps