If you are running in a Windows environment, also seriously consider using OLE to engage Microsoft Excel, itself, in the task of reading its file and handing the data to you.   The reason why I say this is that, well, real-life spreadsheets are complicated beasts and people tend to fiddle with them ... in one-off ways that can fuddle logic that endeavors to read the files directly.   (The result is usually “answers that are incorrect, but you don’t know it.)   Excel can hand you rows-and-columns, and it can locate named-ranges within the workbook (a big plus for future-proofing), and so on, and do it in a “tolerant” way.   Plus, the performance is quite reasonable given all that is going on.   I find that I spend, overall, “less time and less stress” with that approach.