[SQLServer2005] Select from Excel Spreadsheet for SQL-Rejects

This is DBA bread and butter - not being a DBA and having no will whatsoever to become one (I am too weak) I always forget the syntax for this procedure, so here we go.

In order to be able to query an excel spreadsheet we need to enable ad hoc distributed queries, to do so follow the procedure in this other post.

Once that's sorted - assuming you have an excel spreadsheet with column names (in the example I have Column1, Column2, Column3, Column4) in the first row - this is how you go about selecting the spreadsheet content into a temporary table:

USE myDB

-- drop temp table
DROP TABLE #tempTable

-- select spreadsheet content into #tempTable
SELECT S.[Column1], S.[Column2], S.[Column3], S.[Column4]
INTO #tempTable
FROM OPENROWSET
('Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0',
'Excel 8.0;Database=C:\mtSpreadsheet.xls;HDR=YES',
'select * from [Query1$]') AS S;

-- check if the stuff is there
select *
from #tempTable

That's it. Hope it helps some other fellow SQL-Reject.