Hi Rich,

In the case you accept to pay a couple of hundred buck, I recommend you pay a look at:
http://xlsgen.arstdesign.com/

Although I cannot recommend it fully, I ran an extensive series of tests and liked what I saw, both for exports (easy) and imports (not as easy but certainly workable as well). I intend to switch all my complex set of COM-based Office automation stuff to-and-from MS-Excel to xlsgen as soon as can do it.

Do not be fooled by the web site outlook and the language (yep the developer is a French national as far as I could guess...), this is a robust and fast solution indeed!

Daniel