I need to drop 175 of 180 tables in Access 2003 (using an Access 2000 format database). The first thing I tried was going to the table list and trying to select all, control-clicking the ones I want to keep, and choosing “Delete”. However, it turns out you can only select one at a time.
Then I found out a way to get a list of all the table names as plain text and made a bunch of drop statements using Vim:
drop table table_1;
drop table table_2;
...
drop table table_175;
(Obviously, those aren’t the real names.) These statements work fine by themselves (i.e., just executing one at a time, but when I try to run 2 or more of them, I get an error message:
Syntax error in DROP TABLE or DROP INDEX.
That seems to defeat the purpose. Oh, Access… you always make me want to pull my hair out.
What am I missing to make this work? Any process that will let me keep the few tables I need for my purposes would be great. (I’d like to avoid learning any Visual Basic, though.)
Remou has the answer to your problem, but as a suggestion, you may want to import the tables you want to keep into a new file. You can select multiple files and their data. You may end up with a cleaner file unless you have a lot of tables that remain.