Two things I stumbled on; first, my spreadsheet was in a library that was set to require check out for edits. The import seemed to hang in an endless loop. I changed the setting and the import worked. Second, and a lesser issue, my spreadsheet had quite a number of cells that were blank and those all imported with the value 'no title' so there was some clean up to do that would have been easier to do in excel before the import. Otherwise, this was excellent and much appreciated.
Very informative. I do have a question though. After you have already imported the excel file to SP, will that information reflect future changes you may make to the original excel file. Ex: adding a new project name