I'm glad to see you're not going to copy and paste from Excel. I've found that when doing this, data isn't pasted it as it should be, so I avoid this like the plague. Dates and numeric strings formatted with leading zeros are especially problematic. It'll eventually get you into trouble.

Also, using SSMS's data import is so much faster than just pasting into a table that I can't even tell you. What would take me 20 minutes of waiting for a paste to complete would take a few seconds when using the process formerly known as DTS. There's those darn transaction logs that get hit by lots of pasting...