Excel .xls files as data source

Migrateduser

<p>Hello Community,<br><br>
I'm rather new to BIRT and I have the following questions.<br><br>
I have a report which I need to create on a daily basis. The necessary data is provided daily in .xls format.<br>
My Goal is to set up an automated BIRT reporting which takes the xls. files as input and creates a report from this data at a certain time of the day.<br><br>
The problem I’m facing right now is the following:<br><br>
The .xls files are very unstructured (no column names etc.). So when I use the xls. files as a data source and try to create a data set from this source, I can't select the data I need, because BIRT doesn’t recognize the columns correctly.<br>
Is there a way to tell BIRT to read certain cells from an .xls file?<br><br>
Another solution I came up with is the following: I create a database, which imports the data from the .xls files on a daily Basis. Then I use this data base as data source for BIRT. Would you recommend this approach? Which database Management System would you recommend for this? (It should be simple and free, and no additional data will ever be added to this database)<br><br>
If you have other solutions for this problem, I’m open to all ideas.<br><br>
Best regards,<br>
Max<br>
 </p>