I don't believe this is possible, at least, not without some custom scripting. The conversion tool only lets you specify the row that has the column names and the range for the data. There's no way to tell the tool to look elsewhere in the sheet/workbook for metadata on the individual fields.
What's more, the conversion tool only makes a "best guess" at the data type based on a columns contents. A single cell with a typo can cast the whole column as another type.
This is one of the key downsides to spreadsheet-style data as opposed to a true database. Even if you use some of the built-in data validation tools in Excel, there's nothing about a given column that is actually defined on a deeper level that another program would understand.
All that said, with some scripting, I do think this might be doable, and not all that difficult. Suppose you had another sheet in your Excel file called "Field Metadata", in which the fields had settings defined for their alias, type, etc. in its own table. You could use python to convert that table to a list of lists, then submit that as a parameter on Add Fields (multiple). Here's the example from the docs:
import arcpy
arcpy.env.workspace = "C:/data/district.gdb"
arcpy.management.AddFields(
'school',
[['school_name', 'TEXT', 'Name', 255, 'Hello world', ''],
['street_number', 'LONG', 'Street Number', None, 35, 'StreetNumDomain'],
['year_start', 'DATE', 'Year Start', None, '2017-08-09 16:05:07', '']])
You'd need to create an empty feature class first, then use Add Fields. After that, you'd need to append the data from Excel → Feature Class rather than directly converting. But it's still using built-in tools, no custom functions or anything.
- Josh Carlson
Kendall County GIS
