I'd like to know what my best option would be to import data from an excel file on a weekly or monthly basis. At first, I thought I would use SSIS, but after much struggle with seemingly simple tasks, I'm starting to rethink my plan. Would it be better/easier to just write the SQL by hand or use the services of an SSIS package? The basic process will be as follows:

1. A separate process will download an .xls file to a local fileshare.
2. The xls file will have a filename like: 'myfilename MON YY'.
3. I will need to read the month and year from the the filename, reformat it to a sql date and then query a DimDate table to find the corresponding date key.
4. For each row (after the first 2 header rows), insert the data with the date key, unless the row is a total row, then ignore.

Here are some of the issues I've been encountering with SSIS: I can parse the date string from a flat file datasource, but can't seem to do it with an excel data source. Also, once parsed, i cannot seem to convert the string to a date in order to perform the lookup for the date key. For example, I want to do something like this:

select DateKey from DimDate where ActualDate = convert(datetime, '01-' + 'JAN-10', 120)

but i don't think it is possible to use the 'convert' or 'datetime' keywords in an expression builder. I have been also unable to find where I can edit the SQL to ignore the first 2 rows of data.

I'm very skeptical of using SSIS because it seems like a Kludgy way of doing something that can probably be accomplished more efficiently writing the SQL yourself, but I may be forced to use SSIS. Thoughts?