[R] RODBC, sqlFetch error when accessing Excel

[Al Pöhi]

This is about R 2.7.0 and related packages on windows NT.

I have a mixture of numeric and character data and empty cells in an
Excel spreadsheet with several tabs that I'm trying to read with
sqlFetch from RODBC.
The data that is returned by sqlFetch is unfortunately not identical
to the source data in that in columns with character values in the
first few rows the subsequent rows of that column which are filled
with numeric values are not returned properly but set to <NA>.
Specifing as.is=T does not help.
The goal is to read the data from Excel as it is and perform the data
cleaning in R afterwards.

How can this be fixed?

Regards,
Al