James,
To answer only one of your questions...

I too found that importing from a file with headers led to seemingly random field lengths. Finally discovered that Excel exported only as many characters as it could see. If a column cut off data visually that data wasn't exported.

I made the columns containing extra-long data (addresses, etc.) extremely wide in Excel and had no further problems. Strange.....

HTH
Barbara

>Does anyone have answers on how to successfully import from excel without any issues. Here is my problem. I have an excel file and when i issue an import from c:\myfile.xls xl8 the data types in my cursor end up getting all distorted dates turn to numbers numbers to character and the sinereo is never the same so i have been unable to code around this. I have tried reformatting the collumns through the use of a com object and still nothing. I also tried placing column headers at the top of the columns in excel and importing the file then so that everything would be character the problem with this is when you issue the import from it changes the field lengths and you end up loosing the last few characters off certain fields and even this problem is not consistent enough that you can code around it. I have tried append from and so on and nothing works consistently. Any ideas??? One of the other issues is that if a user enter 30 lines of data in excel and erase 5 of them by just clearing
>the cells when you do an import it still will see these 20 lines of data cept the erase ones will be empty and this causes me many problems as well. HELP. I would hate to think that these 2 products just cannot work hand and hand.