Hello @MarStu,
welcome to KNIME Community!
Well if there is no content before headings your heading will always end up in first row if you uncheck option Table contains column names…. Then you promote first row to column header.
See solutions from this topic for it: Promote a Row to be a Column Name
Maybe it would be useful to have an option to have first non empty row as header in Excel Reader…
Br,
Ivan