If you were to start afresh and come to the stage where you can make changes to the data you will see this screen. Here for the two columns with the data type date, you can pull down on the drop-down and change them to type Date.

If you now continue to load you will end up with 9 failures and 0 successes as shown in the next picture. The reason for this is that the date format mm/dd/yy is not acceptable to Oracle 10G XE.

Now if you click on the hyperlink in the Failed column in the next table pertaining to this load, TestNW2, you will see the following screen displayed. This shows why the failure occurred (Ora 01843: not a valid month).

Now if you make the following changes while loading you will see that the loading was a success for this loading, TestNW4.

You may click on the table name TestNW4 and verify that the data type for the two columns with the date data type came out okay.

Summary

Loading an MS Excel file into Oracle 10G XE was a very simple exercise. It required no more than cutting and pasting the data. The interface is simple, intuitive and the loading process is well staged. It would have been helpful if some interactive help were available for data formatting. The reporting of loading success and failure is immediately available without opening another file, making the process very simple and effortless. Oracle 10G XE is really a one-stop solution for data management and application development that would appeal to many.