Excel - Spanned Cells

[mutchman]

I am accessing an Excel spreadsheet via ODBC and was wondering if there is anyway to get PHP to recognize spanned cells? What I mean is, for example,

Column 1........Column 2

1..........|..........Frank.........|
............|---------------------|
............|...........Fred..........|
---------------------------------|

In column 1 I have a single cell per entry. However, column 2 has multiple cells for every single cell in column 1. Is there anyway to get PHP via ODBC to recognize that mulitples cells span a single cell found in column 1?

Thanks in advance for any help.