Only problem I've noted with exporting to some form of delimited text and then trying to use SSIS is that Excel tries to save space when exporting. If you have a possible 20 columns, but one row doesn't have the last 3 columns filled in, you get no delimiters for those columns. I usually find this out when I get some "too big" or "can't CAST" message for something like an INT field which now has text in it due to the fields getting wrapped.

There are some CONNECT tickets open about allowing us to specify whether EOL characters can override the column delimiters, but the behavior won't change for SQL 2005. The best we've gotten so far are people suggesting script tasks to correctly read EOL characters. To make it easier on me, I add a "dummy" column as the last column and populate it with integers all the way to the end of the dataset. I can then export with no missing columns. Maybe Excel 2007 is better about that, but I never had good luck with it prior to 2007.

I appreciate the article, though. This is one of the really annoying parts of trying to work with Excel and SSIS. Excel is really common and easy to use so we get it as source data from a lot of our customers. I just wish it played better with SSIS.