Place Excel file and keep accurate formatting

In my organization, InDesign is used for creating several rather comprehensive price lists (500 pages and more ...).
Needless to say, each price list contains a lot of tables. Currently we
create tables in Excel,
save it as pdf file and
place the pdf in InDesign
Of course, that's cumbersome (no Edit Original command --> each modification in the original table restarts the above mentioned process) - that gives us a hard time dealing with hundreds of tables... 
It would be ideal to place Excel files directly - but after hours of trial & error I'm still not able to insert a table AND keep the accurate Excel-formatting. There are always some smaller or bigger deviations (unexpected line breaks, overset content, wrong line-styles, colors etc.)
What I did:
Enabled "Create Links When Placing Text and Spreadsheet Files" in the File Handling Preferences
Enabled "Import Options" when placing the Excel file
Choosed "Formatted Table"
It seems that some older xls files are more likely to raise problems. Newly-created xlsx files are fine most of the time (saving xls to xlsx doesn't make a difference though).
What are your experiences on importing excel files? Thanks for any hint!
Regards,
Florian

Thanks, Willi.
The reason why we currently place our tables as PDF is, that we want to avoid any additional setup in InDesign. In fact we use InDesign "merely" to place & arrange all objects like tables, images, text etc. properly. There is no editing or formatting of content done in InDesign (Excel-spreadsheets are well-designed anyway) - I think otherwise our loads of price lists for different countries wouldn't be manageable at the moment ...
I'm just looking for a way to keep the advantage of placing PDFs (retain accurate form) and eliminate the disadvantages (additional step of saving each spreadsheet as PDF and lack of the "Edit Original" option).
Any ideas are appreciated!
Florian

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