I found that the error was occuring in a place I didn't expect. In the Excel Source task, the Input and Output Properties did not have matching data types. I had to set them both to Unicode text stream [DT_NTEXT]. Not sure why the default values didn't match when I tried redoing this a couple times but that was the main cause. I then just used a derived column with (DT_STR, 4000, 1252)Comments and it worked. I also tried using two Data Conversion Tasks. That also worked, BUT, where I got stuck on that is, when mapping fields to the final OLE Destination, I had to map the original Comments field to the database Comments field...I would have expected that I should use the CommentsConv field that I created in the Data Conversion Task. But if I mapped what I thought was the converted CommentsConv field, it would give an error. How odd.