I have an excel worksheet that gets external data from a SQL 2005 source. It
queries a view I've defined, where the column names, 3 of them, include
periods in the column name.

I cannot get Excel to import these columns, it keeps kicking out with a
syntax error near the period. It works fine if I remove the periods, but
unfortunately without the periods, the usefulness of pulling the external
data drops significantly.

I've dug around, hoping to find an update to MS Query in order to work
around the problem, with no luck. Any thoughts?

A workaround I am facing, is to change the source data to not have the
period in SQL, and then add the period back in with a macro (find/replace on
the column header). I'd prefer to have it right natively, rather than fixing
it via macro.

Any thoughts