Query worksheet using column range

Question

I'm trying to query an excel worksheet using ADODB. The problem is there are many columns with a similar name and I'm unable to select the correct column in my query. Is there a was to select the column by using its range? Something like

select [A:A],[AB:AB] from [Sheet1$]

The source worksheet kind of looks like this

     A      B      C      D     E     F     G      H     I
1                  08/19/2013         08/18/2013         08/17/2013
2  Col1   Col2    col3   col4  col5   col3  col4   col5  col3
3   

When I try to import all the data I get all the data minus the column names, only col1 and col2 are fetched. Its the same when I do from [Sheet1$] and from [Sheet1$A2:K100]

Answer 1

If there are multiple columns with the same or similar names, Excel/ODBC will probably do some funky name-mangling to make sure they are different in the recordset. What I would do is get all the columns with "SELECT *" then examine the fields names in the result set - then you can go back and retrieve by name just the columns you want.