PaulS:
But is there a way to solve this without importing??
Yes, there is. Open a .xls file in notepad. See all the special characters? Figure out what they mean, and write the corresponding data to the file you create, with the .xls extension.
I started to do that once, and gave up. This document may help if you want to take that route - http://www.openoffice.org/sc/excelfileformat.pdf.