The best resource I've come across for reading Excel files using the libname engine is
http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/sugi31/024-31.pdf.
Is the data in the spreadsheets contained in named ranges? If not, can you get to them to define the ranges you want prior to reading them? This is the only way I'm aware of to get SAS to start reading data anywhere other than the top left cell on the specified sheet. For example, if you defined the name 'datarange' for the data you wanted on the sheet 'daily q phase i', then you could read this with
DATA README1 ; SET GETIT.datarange ;
HTH