By itself, that's not too bad. However, when you have an Excel file with 15 sheets and need to import all of them, preferably into pre-existing/typed columns, it becomes a little more difficult. The ODBC interface to Excel leaves a lot to be desired.

Also, see some of my other issues with Excel and saving out to CSV. If you have empty columns at the end of your data set (not too uncommon), Excel doesn't populate empty columns into your CSV for you. It leaves off those commas and ends the line. Excel can re-import that without too much trouble. SSIS cannot. It reads past the end of the line because the next delimiter it expects is a comma. Once it reaches the last field it expects as end of line based solely on the number of commas, it reads all the way up to the EOL character. That in turn almost always leads to some sort of error indicating that you're trying to put too much data into a column.

Solution to that - a "dummy" column for your last column in Excel that is completely filled with data, even if just an integer or an 'x'.

Sadly, this is all outside of the control of the SSIS/SQL Team as it has to do almost completely with how Excel and ODBC work together (read - not very well). 😛

-Peter