Right, I agree - bad word choosing from my side. I should have think of at least EBCDIC character format, if nothing else! So instead stating that "it can handle only ASCII files" I should have said "it can handle only plain TEXT files that maight use various character-encoding schemes". And even this might not be totaly accurate, as it actually "partialy" supports binary data too ("native" datatipes!). But those non-character datatypes (*******, FLOAT, DOUBLE, ....) in their binary format can not be delimited, i.e. they either are (OS-dependant) predefined fixed length or you must specify their length, but can never be sepparated with delimiters.

Anyway, I don't think there is any way you could directly load binary xls file with SQL*Loader.