How do I find the character encoding of a ms access database?

Question

How do I find out what character encoding the tables in my MS Access 2003 database have?

For example:

• Windows-1252
• ISO 8859-1
• US-ASCII

Answer 1

Is there something not working with CurrentDB.CollatingOrder? I don't know where you look up the value of the resulting number, but in my American DBs, it returns 1033, which is quite familiar as the American English character set.

Ah, yes, if I go into the Object Browser in the VBE and search for CollatingOrder, one of the results shows an ENUM called CollatingOrderEnum, and by clicking on each in turn, you can see its value.

DBEngine(0)(0).CollatingOrder is the same property, and can be used with DAO from outside Access. There is, perhaps, a way to get it with ADO/OLEDB, but I don't use either of them so can't point you in the right direction there.