Problem with MS Access, the clipboard and something called Biff5!

Question

Hi,

I have a legacy app I am currently supporting that is having problems when people copy large quantities of data from a datasheet view.

The App is built in MS Access and the amount of rows being copied can get pretty large (sometimes in the thousands).

The funny thing about it is, you can paste the data out, but then Access keeps "rendering" the data into different formats and becomes CPU bound for LONG periods of time.

The Status message beside the progress bar at the bottom right of the MS Access Window is

Rendering Data to format: Biff5

Biff5 is a "Binary Interchange File Format (BIFF) version 5" According to Source

The app code doesn't use BIFF5 anywhere so I don't think this is an app problem.

I cannot find any data on this error anywhere on the web so I thought it would be a good question for stackoverflow.

So, can anyone help please?

Answer 1

I am not sure what the problem is but sometimes you can run into some very quirky bugs with Access. Have you tried running this on different machines? Different OS's? Would it be possible to paste the data into Excel and then import into Access using import functionality? Can you import the data directly instead of pasting it?

Answer 2

Hi Ethan,

We are all on the same OS here for this, I am investigating the possibility that some update sent out in the last maintenance window has caused this, as it wasn't a problem before this and there have been no new releases of the software in that time period.

Tried in on lot's of machines, same issue on them all.

The problem is actually with copying from a datasheet view in Access and pasting to Excel, not the other way around strangely.

Here is the use case

Access --> "Copy from datasheet"(Normal Ctrl+C) --> "paste into Excel" (Normal Ctrl + V) (this works fine!)

When you then go back to Access to continue working, it is CPU bound doing the "Rendering Data to format: " thing, I mentioned above.

I'm stumped to be honest, it's all a bit strange.

Answer 3

Instead of trying to copy-paste, can't you just export the query to Excel?

Answer 4

Hi Birger,

That would be fine if it hadn't worked the other way up until about 6 weeks ago. (The users are not going to change how they do that unless I can give them a good reason for it)

I'm not sure if MS have pushed something out that might have changed the behaviour of that functionality.

Any suggestions?