my 2 cents here regarding the field types and formatting issues. If you are only reading from an excel and want to update the information, use an excel function as someone said earlier like "=CONCATENATE("'",D2,"',")" to add characters to your cell.... if you need that when you create a destination excel, just create a template xls with the above formatting formulas, then copy this template (through file task) and then link it to your destination excel connection.