title: How to turn huge Excel sheets into a database?
body: <p>I have 12 very-large Excel sheets.</p>
  
  <p>Each one is 102 columns wide, and an average of 600K rows long.</p>
  
  <p>They're all identical in structure.</p>
  
  <p>Quite often I need to run a specific query, from only a subset of columns, with a specific criteria. And the process of doing so by opening each file and filtering/sorting/finding what I need has become very tedious.</p>
  
  <p>If they were all in a database, such queries would be so much easier.</p>
  
  <p>I tried MS Access, and I tried SQL Server Express.</p>
  
  <p>Both die on me during the respective Import wizards.</p>
  
  <p>And the failure is certainly due to the size of the data set, because if I manually trim a file to say 10 rows, the import works fine.</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas how to do this? I'm open to using Access, or SQL Server Express, or any other tool that does the job really.</p>
  
  <p>Note: Some of the columns contain records that contain commas, hence several suggestions I found to turn the files into CSVs prior to import, ended up with broken structure.</p>
  
  <p>Edit 1: They're 12 separate workbooks, with 1 sheet in each. And the aim is create a single table where all the data is appended.</p>