Oh, I'm a moron. I thought that the stored proc did the conversion directly from xls. My bad.

Thanks for pointing that out. ( sorry!! )

When running this script, I get:

SET @WorkSheet=NULL; SELECT @WorkSheet=CAST(BulkColumn as xml) FROM OPENROWSET (BULK 'M:\HTS\Export\currency.xls', SINGLE_BLOB ) A;

XML parsing: line 0, character 0, unrecognized input signature at line 1

Msg...