And as Chris Morris so wisely just pointed out in this thread:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic466056-149-1.aspx#bm467382

"You can't delete a row, but since you can blank out cells, for most purposes is doesn't...

Good thought, thanks again, Chris!

For numeric cells, do you just update to NULLs?

Just to follow up my testing results...

Once the UPDATE worked, I tried:

1. INSERT - worked like a charm, and Excel even updated the range to include the inserted row.

2. DELETE...

Thanks!

At first glance it looks right on. (I'll have to study it a bit, since I'm a slow learner.)

That should be a big help!

Andras: Re:

"On SQL Server 2008 you will be able to pass a table variable as a parameter, but SS2k8 is not yet released "

I wonder if this will allow an...

There was a lot of discussion re temp tables in this exchange:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic439174-8-1.aspx

where I got a lot of good answers from Jeff and others.

and...re #procedures, I would have never...

Great suggestion Jeff!

I don't suppose I can prefix the temp procedure name with a '#', so my "main" will need to drop it when done?

Thanks Chris for your input!

A simple select worked fine. (The Excel cells are numeric, and the value is passed as a float, so the leading zero is not a problem.)...

Here is the link:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q316934

that contains the statement re delete:

Delete Records

Although the Jet OLE DB Provider allows you to insert and update records in an Excel workbook, it does...

Leading zeroes in a number do not change the value of the number; it is simply a formatting issue. In your Excel worksheet, just assign a custom format (e.g. 00000000...

Just for further testing (and because it would be just like me to screw up the update query syntax), I did a select into a local table from the Excel...

I don't think it is SSIS, it is the SQL engine. Even though you read the file sequentially, where the rows wind up in the destination table is not...

Re: " I didn't try using the identity method, as I'm always concerned (probably needlessly) that the order of inserts might not necessarily be guaranteed to be identical to that...

Since I don't work at home, I can't comment.

But let me try it for 4-5 years, and I'll get back to you. 🙂

Matt - I'm embarrassed that I didn't realize that at the time; being in a hurry I just cursed and set the field back to an int. Guess I've just...