"A client asked me if I could perform ETL on some Excel documents used by "The Business". With the corporate world living off Excel, this is becoming a very common request. Having seen the documents, this is an insurance company, I knew it would not be possible to use the stock adapters that are shipped with SSIS.

Having found DataDefractor on the net, I tried it and was very happy with the initial results.

After purchasing it, I got down to using it in earnest and was truly pleased with its ability to dissect the spreadsheets. There did not at any point seem to be any hindrance to "get at the data". Any stumbling block was in fact self inflicted and after taking a step back, a way was found, which in hind sight, seemed logical in any case.

Results obtained from DataDefractor are simple: I have my data in a warehouse. Quickly, easily and reliably. Without DataDefractor reams of custom code would be needed."

"Westpac Global Energy trades multiple commodities across multiple geographies. Trade data from these activities is published in formats which are difficult to process without resorting to scripting which creates significant operational risk, for example when processing spreadsheets containing date/time fields produced in the US on a UK server.

Maintaining these data feeds is a significant overhead. DataDefractor allowed us to replace these complex and hard to maintain SSIS scripts in a matter of hours, and the reliability of our data has increased significantly."

"I had a great perception before I bought DataDefractor since an MVP (who had helped before) on the MSDN SSIS forum suggested it.

It saved me a ton of customized work. The default SSIS Excel transformation could not detect certain cells in the spreadsheet. Furthermore if the column headings in an Excel spreadsheet are not on the first row, extraction is made much more complicated. I would have had to extract the Excel spreadsheet into a comma separated value txt file (somehow…I haven’t done this before) and then import the “CSV” file into my SQL Server table.

DataDefractor SSIS allowed me to do this all (extract several types of spreadsheets in the same workbook with different formatting) in one step."