@GQRanalytics if you absolutely must you could indeed employ Python and OpenPyxl (with pandas) to import your data pretty fast. Unfortunately OpenPyxl is not (yet?) in the standard environment of KNIME 4.6 native python integration so my example still uses Conda Environment propagation.
aside: @carstenhaubold this would be another case for having OpenPyxl on board 
kn_example_python_excel_import_knime.knwf (796.4 KB)
This approach might be (well) over engineered for your task but once Python integration has been updated there might be additional use cases that might easily be done just by KNIME and its Python node.