Jason, it was mainly the bulk of the insert due to high volume of fields. Unweildy and non friendly so I was asked to cut it down in size...

Ah I see. many thanks for offer but no, don't go to that much trouble, I have to do some leg work afterall 🙂

Thanks for the updates,been much appreciated

Hi Paul, sorry but I dont follow. Where does the function come into play since your merge doesn't use it, you're still literally listing column names and values in...

Hi Paul, thats great for the column names but of course I have to parse it the values too. As the tables are identical I was hoping I could...

Cheers Paul, yes you're right it all boils down to the huge column and values list. Will review your example and give it a whirl. Thanks

Hi, it's literally the very basic MERGE command syntax and it's being used to re-insert deleted records from a table. there are no conditions apart from the WHERE NOT EXIST......

Hi, thanks for the reply. The version of Office / Excel I have installed is 2010 though I tried to specify the destination version as both version 97-2003 and...

Oh yes on all accounts!! Its a terrible data model and one I particularly hate dealing with since nothing from back end through to user front end is consistent...

The records in his spreadsheet that I created my temp table from were supposed to be unique so I never created my own table key but still shoulda done a...

Annoyed with myself now! The customer told me they were unique records and as the select /update was based on unique key I didn't stop to think that there...

I'm wondering that too but am thinking is it due to my having the '\\MYSERVER" mapping in the command when I don't have a reconnected mapped name to the shared...

Hi, using a select instead of an update produces same result. I know the batch script is being called as my manual log is being updated on the server...