arcgis-desktoparcmapcoordinatesexcelimport
I am importing an Excel table with X/Y coordinates to plot on a map (point data).
The original Excel table has a header row as its top row..The row is 'frozen' in Excel.
When I import the table and view it in ArcMap (10), the header row of the original Excel sheet is gone, and the first feature row is now the header row in ArcMap.
How can I avoid this?
It didn't work because while saving it defaulted to a CSV UTF-8 file type instead of a normal CSV file type. Once I changed to regular CSV file type, it worked just fine. 
Unfortunately, I believe the extra step to export the Excel file to a .csv file will be necessary.
There have been issues with regards to importing Microsoft Office files in various GIS packages. A lot of this can be due to the drivers for 64 bit operating systems.
It may be worth the experiment to see if what you are attempting will work in a 32 bit version of the operating system.
The one nice thing with exporting a .csv file is the ability to set up a watch file during the text file import, then any changes made to the text file will be reflected in the joined data without having to recreate the join within QGIS.
Best Answer
I had the same problem (Arcmap would not import my csv file with headers, instead it would show Field1, Field2, Field3 etc). When I examined the file headers in Excel, I found...decimals numbers, spaces, percent signs etc. After replacing all of that with underscores or text, I had no problems. I dragged the .csv file into arcmap, opened the attribute table and all the headers were displayed perfectly.