Hi Jon

>This may not be directly related, but thought it would be worthwhile to share. I recall having to work on a SQL DTS package to import data from Excel to SQL Server. I was experiencing problems with some of the values getting transformed to NULL and couldn't figure out why until I read the following article:
>
>http://www.sqldts.com/default.aspx?6,222,254,0,1

Thanks for sharing this information!

In that article, when it reads:

"...the driver looks at the first 8 rows of data in a column and makes the decision that all data is to be of that type."

Tells much about it, because I always thougth the import operation conversion rules were based on destination (i.e. the table) columns attributes and not based on what its (the Excel spreadsheet columns) data looks like.

Fernando