Yes Rich, I spent days trying to crack this and in the end had to cut my losses and battle the SSIS import which in itself proved ridiculously difficult. This is largely do to the inability to set Excel metadata on import which then truncates all text fields to 255 characters. A dark art combination/permutation of IMEX=0/IMEX=1 in the source file connection string and/or padding the source spreadsheet with hidden dummy large text fields eventually got the data in, but as newbie to the asp.net/SSIS environment I hear myself repeatedly asking the same question "why should it ever be this hard?". Not exactly an inspiring start to this environment but at least it's good to know I'm not alone on this one.