Thank you, that was a great help and worked well with the termination date column. I still have one issue. I have this errant last column in my spreadsheet. It is column AH, which makes it reader.item(33) after I read the data into an OleDbDataReader. This is also a column that sometimes has a date and sometimes has a blank. Now if I reference it with its name, that is, reader.Item("C annuitant"), it bombs with an index out of range error. But if I reference it with the numeric index, 33, it's fine. So it just seems like there is something screwy going on with this field. And if I give in and say fine, I'll just call it reader.item(33), I am still not getting the data in that variable that I see in Excel. Is this related to my original problem or something different and more screwy?