Hello,
I have been working on this for a bit, and believe there may be an issue with the Excel importer in this case. At any rate, I am unable to get the Excel importer to do what you wish. I will submit a Tech Support track to investigate, but in the meantime, I've found a workaround which I hope will work for you.
JMP's text import wizard happily imports the data in the way you've specified. If you save off the Excel file as a text-delimited file (personally I recommend the.csv format), you can easily import the data.
After exporting the .xlsx file to .csv, be sure when attempting to open it the .csv file with the "OPEN..." command on the main menu that the "use default program" box is cleared. This allows you to select the "Data (Using Preview) radio button:
Select the desired file (which is now a .csv file), click "Open", and when the wizard appears, ensure the following selections (which are defaults) are made:
Click NEXT, then IMPORT, and a table is created:
Right-clicking on the SOURCE script in the upper left of the table and selecting "Edit" will show you a script you can run to bypass the wizard in the future, making it easy for you to recreate this table with the most recent version of the .csv file, whenever you wish.
Cheers,
Brady