Not sure the name of the person who emailed with this response: >Microsoft's driver for Excel takes the first 7 rows of each column and >guesses the datatype. If the data in a column varies at all (ie >.12/20/01 and Dec 20 2001, etc), you will encounter problems.
but thanks for the info!! I was pulling my hair out once trying to figure out why even SQL Server, when importing data direct from Excel using its wizard, would sometimes leave chunks of data empty!! As an example there was a column for Check# which is usually integer but somestimes has text. The SQL Server column was defined as VarChar but it kept loading only integer values and left all the text values blank! I think Excel was first interpreting its column as integer based on the first few values so it threw out the text values. The solution was to format the column as 'Text' in Excel instead of leaving it at 'General'. Go figure. And this is an all-Microsoft transfer. Karne
