OleDb connection to Excel; how do I select fixed width, unbounded height?

Question

I\'m using OleDb to select data from excel spreadsheets. Each spreadsheet can contain many small tables, and possibly furniture like titles and labels. So it might look like

Answer 1

We read the entire spreadsheet (ie: SELECT * FROM [Sheet1$]) and handle everything else in our application code. It's easy enough to race through the resultant OleDbDataReader to get to the starting point of your data and start processing.

It may not be the absolutely fastest way to suck data from Excel, but it is reliable.