I've been needing to import the data from an Excel worksheet for a few
months now, only ever arriving at dead ends. I've tried using
automation, until I was told that automation is for interfacing with a
running app, not importing data files produced by that app. I've also
tried ODBC, but it seems the Excel ODBC driver is flakey. It
arbitrarily decides that columns that have strings are floating-point
types. I've also tried ADO, but that also seems to use ODBC.
So how can I import an Excel file without using the ODBC driver? Or
is there a patch for that ODBC driver?