Roy -
Just chiming in that I used the Excel import plugin successfully this week, but was having troubles using it with v9.9.21, so I downloaded the latest beta version of PVD, and it worked great. (I can't vouch that the switch from the stable release to the preview release is what made the difference, however, since I did also make some changes to the Excel spreadsheet during that time, as well.)
The Excel document that I used has over 2700 rows.
I did make sure I had the columns organized a certain way, though. First column was ID (which I put the exact same thing I had in my 7th column, LOCATION). The second column was TITLE. Third column, YEAR; fourth column DESCRIPTION; fifth, COMMENTS; sixth, RELEASE DATE; and seventh column, LOCATION (which, in this case, since I was importing records of my videotapes, was the number I assigned to each particular VHS tape -- i.e., 823-01 or ST-A-01). The "type" format of all columns except DATE was formatted as Text. All columns had a header row.
There was a lot of babysitting while I was importing, but despite the time it took, it was a pretty easy method of getting over 2,700 titles into the database, relatively speaking.