Getting data in to C++ from excel, any help would be greatly appreciated

[Surreall]

you have 4 nested 4 loops.
From a quick glance, it doesn't look like the innermost code has any obvious shortcuts or way to speed things up (much).

If you want even more speed, then the trick now is to figure out a better method for achieving the same results rather than finding a few tweaks here and there.
Without knowing what your code actually tries to accomplish, there's not much we can do there to help though.

q and c both iterating over columns with an exception if q and c are identical makes me believe you are probably doing things that can be removed.

Sounds fair enough. With the q and c if you look at my little 3x3 matrix above. I compare column1(ie q) with the second and third column (ie c). I then compare column 2 (q) with the first and third column (ie c) and lastely compare column3 (q) with the first and second column(c).

The actual array has 39 columns, so lots and lots of iterations

Rgds

Surreall