Linked SQL Server Tables in Microsoft Access 97 represent the SQL definition of the table defined in the remote database. This implies that if a column is defined with type char(10), Access will show in Datasheet View 10 characters per row in the column. This in turn implies that when there are only two characters of "useful" data in the row, Access will "pad" 8 spaces after the two characters.

There are two ways to deal with this problem: (i) use the more expensive varchar() data type on the tables in the remote database; or (ii) use the VBA.Trim() (or VBA.RTrim()) function on values taken out of the column.