There is a standing incompatibility between Microsoft Access 97 and the Microsoft ODBC driver for SQL Server 7.0. If you link a table to a SQL Server 7.0 database through the ODBC driver, Access cannot read SQL Server NTEXT columns. (SQL Server 7.0 has an arbitrarily long UNICODE text field; the Access equivalent data type is MEMO.)

CONNX supports the SQL Server 7.0 NTEXT data type, which is transparently converted to a non-UNICODE string and is handled as a LONGVARCHAR (a CLOB or String BLOB)). This CONNX data type can be manipulated by Access 97. Using CONNX as a transition layer between the Access application and a SQL Server database corrects the incompatibility. Import the SQL Server 7.0 data into an CONNX CDD and create a DSN for it. Then in Access 97, create a linked table to the CONNX data source.