I agree with Stephen's recommendation to save the Excel spreadsheet to a CSV file. One problem I have encountered is that Microsoft will enclose a field in delimiters when you "need" it. That means that for a given field, sometimes it is enclosed in delimiters and sometimes not. Such inconsistency is hard for SQL*Loader to deal with. I don't have a solution for this one, just pointing out a problem that you may or may not encounter.