I occassionally get given large amounts of data and for some reason people seem to favour Excel for storing their information – even if it’s 25,000 records. I’m assuming that their crazyness isn’t just focussed on data storing but that they also talk to trees and bathe in pea soup, but who knows.
Anyway, the usual way I get it into a usable format is to import the Excel into Access, export it into a local instal of MySQL, and then dump it into an SQL file to transfer to the server I need it on.
Problem is, since I last did this I’ve had a new PC and when I tried using mysqldump on this machine, I kept getting the error “Access is Denied” at the command prompt. After a little searching it turns out that the problem is the User Account Control that’s been in place since Windows Vista. It doesn’t ask for permission in the command prompt environment, just comes up with the Access is Denied message.
The solution. Go to Start and in the search box type in “cmd”. This will show the command prompt in the results and all you have to do is right-click on it and click “Run as Administrator”. This will let you do a dump without any errors.