The parent page explains the details perfectly, but I found it cumbersome to create the SQL insert statements in my spreadsheet, so I decided to go with several "sheets" in my spreadsheet that I could export as text files and then import into the database.

• I started with the spreadsheet containing my data to be imported and added nid and vid columns at the front, and autonumbered them as in the above example.
• Then I added sheets for the four tables that I wanted to create data for (node, content_type_project, node_revisions, and node_comment_statistics)
• In each sheet I used formulas to create the data (not the SQL inserts) from the original first sheet.
• I exported each sheet as TXT. (I was using Google Spreadsheets, and it created a very nice tab-delimited text file. I believe that if you used Excel you would get the exact same result.) Using tab-delimited text files means no worries about quotes and commas, unless of course there are tabs somewhere in your data.
• I imported the text files. There are many ways to import a file of this type, but I did this using PHPmyadmin's import facility, just choosing "CSV" and changing the field delimiter to \t.
• Finally, don't forget to update the sequences table

My resulting XLS file is attached. You may be able to use it as a starting place.