thanks for hanging in with me.

First, correction: the destination column is set to nvarchar so it too is Unicode.

Next, I went to excel source advanced editor and attempted to edit the external metadata for that column from Unicode string [DT_WSTR] 255 to 800. But, external metadata just reverts back to 255 when I close the dialogue box. I upped the metadata for Excel source column's output to 800 and while it 'sticks' the package still fails at source.

I have been in scenarios where the Excel source transform passes the data through and then a column fails downs stream, and for this scenario I use data conversion transforms. But I am not getting past the ingestation stage even.