Working with Excel files in ArcGIS: If you have a lot of formatting like merged cells and such in your excel files, you will want to take advantage of 'named extents' that identify just the cells with real data in them. Here are some notes from the ArcGIS 9.2 Web help on working with Excel files... You can open Microsoft Excel tables directly in ArcGIS and work with them like other tabular data sources. For example, you can add them to ArcMap, preview them in ArcCatalog, and use them as inputs to geoprocessing tools. Excel files are added to ArcMap like other data, through the Add Data dialog box. When you browse to an Excel file, you will need to choose which table you want to open. For example, if you have an Excel workbook called sales_figures.xls that contains three worksheets—Sales, Month, and Year to date—each worksheet is a separate table in ArcGIS. Any name references to cells or ranges defined in Excel are preserved in ArcGIS. When accessed from ArcGIS, a worksheet is shown as a table with a $ at the end of its name, but a named range does not have a $. Worksheets or named ranges with names containing spaces have single quotation marks placed around the table name. Once added to ArcMap, you can open the table from the Source tab of the table of contents. However, you will not be able to edit the table or export records to an Excel format. Read the help topic for more information...