I see this question has been raised before but none of the suggested solutions fits my situation. I need to import to SQL Server a collection of around 50 spreadsheets every day. I have no control over the design of these spreadsheets and have to deal with them as they are. Each sheet consists of a header section of 6 rows, with several items of data appearing in merged cells - stuff like date, originating branch and so on. If I import all the cells in a particular row they are all null. I had expected that the leftmost cell would contain data and the other cells merged with it would be nulls, but all are null.
I have tried exporting the sheet as CSV and importing that. The results were erratic, with data sometimes appearing and sometimes not. Ultimately this job must be run as a scheduled job on my SQL Server which does not have Excel installed, so I cannot write VBA or scripts to unmerge all the merged cells.