SQL Server: Import data from excel to SQL Server is BAD IDEA!?!

YES IT IS... According to me, it is not a good idea when you have alphanumeric characters in any of the columns.

Several times I have imported data from excel sheets to SQL Server. No errors popped. But when data is thoroughly checked there will be data loss if you have alphanumeric data in any of the columns.

The following behaviors of the Jet provider with the Excel driver can lead to unexpected results when reading data from an Excel data source.

• Data sources: The source of data in an Excel workbook can be a worksheet, to which the $ sign must be appended (for example, Sheet1$), or a named range (for example, MyRange). In a SQL statement, the name of a worksheet must be delimited (for example, [Sheet1$]) to avoid a syntax error caused by the $ sign. The Query Builder automatically adds these delimiters. When you specify a worksheet or range, the driver reads the contiguous block of cells starting with the first non-empty cell in the upper-left corner of the worksheet or range. Therefore you cannot have empty rows in the source data, or an empty row between title or header rows and the data rows.
  
• Missing values: The Excel driver reads a certain number of rows (by default, 8 rows) in the specified source to guess at the data type of each column. When a column appears to contain mixed data types, especially numeric data mixed with text data, the driver decides in favor of the majority data type, and returns null values for cells that contain data of the other type. (In a tie, the numeric type wins.) Most cell formatting options in the Excel worksheet do not seem to affect this data type determination. You can modify this behavior of the Excel driver by specifying Import Mode. To specify Import Mode, add IMEX=1 to the value of Extended Properties in the connection string of the Excel connection manager in the Properties window. For more information, see PRB: Excel Values Returned as NULL Using DAO OpenRecordset.
  
• Truncated text: When the driver determines that an Excel column contains text data, the driver selects the data type (string or memo) based on the longest value that it samples. If the driver does not discover any values longer than 255 characters in the rows that it samples, it treats the column as a 255-character string column instead of a memo column. Therefore, values longer than 255 characters may be truncated. To import data from a memo column without truncation, you must make sure that the memo column in at least one of the sampled rows contains a value longer than 255 characters, or you must increase the number of rows sampled by the driver to include such a row. You can increase the number of rows sampled by increasing the value of TypeGuessRows under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Jet\4.0\Engines\Excel registry key. For more information, see PRB: Transfer of Data from Jet 4.0 OLEDB Source Fails w/ Error.
  
  The above details obtained from Microsoft Library. Follow the below link
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms141683.aspx