Steve -- it was your user point level names that prompted me to start this thread in the first place! 🙂 (Love your editorials, BTW!!!)

My sister-in-law lives in Denver,...

I just tried running your query on one of my own tables that has dates, and didn't have a problem.

BTW, Grant is correct . . . you should avoid...

If my team wins, it's worth it! 😀

One of us usually ends up sleeping on the couch! 🙂

I'd be surprised if there isn't one out there somewhere. I actually found the baseball database by doing a Google...

Yeah, lifelong upstate New Yorker here.

It also occurred to me that maybe this thread does have something to do with SQL. One of the things I've been doing with...

Yikes!!! That's good...

I just remembered something . . .

VARCHAR(MAX) is equivalent to the TEXT type in SQL Server. You should change the column type to TEXT. However, Microsoft is depreciating...

No. What I'm saying is change the destination to VARCHAR(MAX). That would make the column large enough to be handle variable-length character data to whatever the upper limit...

One other thought (speaking of stray characters): data cleansing is always a good thing. For example, since you're importing from Excel, it's probably using the TAB character as a...

Sheez . . . that's quite the variety of data.

Here's how I'd tackle it . . .