Symptom

When attempting to connect an Excel database, you may receive the following error message:

BarTender: Error Message #3238: OLE DB encountered an error accessing your database. The error may
be correctable by doing one or more of the following: 

1) Closely inspecting all settings in your Database Connection Setup dialog. 
2) Confirming that you can read and search your database with another database tool. 

Check the error messages you wish to ignore in the future:

0x80004005 Too many fields defined.

Applicable to

BarTender

Excel

Solution

There are too many fields defined in the excel document for the database driver to handle. This can happen if you added more columns than you are using and haven't deleted them. They can appear just as blank columns with header or field names. Deleting these extra columns will make this error go away.