SQL Server Performance  Excel datasource: most annoying thing
ever invented?!  Discussion in 'SQL Server 2005 Integration
Services' started by merrillaldrich, Oct 17, 2007.    1.
merrillaldrich New Member      OK, I have to share (read
"vent"). My company almost daily gets data to load into SQL
Server, and it comes in Excel, because Excel has that nice
table-like interface that makes it easy to enter, well, tables
of data. Oh, if it were that simple. Excel is WAY too smart for
its own good.     Said data always has addresses, and addresses,
in the US anyway, always have ZIP codes and ZIP+4 codes. They
look like this:     A clever person will even select Format
Cells > Text to preserve the leading zero. Why oh why for the
love of all that is decent in this world can't the Excel
datasource read that correctly, and when it can't, why does it
not give some, er, ERROR MESSAGE or WARNING that it is stripping
most/all zip codes out of your data and replacing them with
NULL.     Here's what I do to work around this s