okay! small victory thanks to all on this thread (esp Vani). i was able to get the tutorial to work and have been playing around with it, trying to tailor it to my requirements.
one thing i have run across so far, and i'm not sure if there's a fix, and that is i need to be able to show leading or trailing zeroes in my excel file. if i insert values into the table with trailing/leading zeroes and run the package, the trailing/leading zeroes are removed in excel, i guess since the containing cell is formatted to General by default? is there a solution that anyone knows of here?