Illustrator :: Copying And Pasting Cells With Bold Text From Excel 2011 (Mac) Into AI CS5

I have an issue with copying cells containing text from Microsoft Excel 2011 for Mac and pasting them into Illustrator CS5. I select the whole cell(s) from Excel, open a blank Ai document and, without anything selected so the format is preserved, I paste the cells.
 
The issue comes with the resulting copy of the cells in Ai. The type which was bold in Excel is bold in Ai... but not really. Ai pastes the bolded text as not bold, but then makes a copy of that same text, puts a stroke on it, then places that over the regular text, so it looks bold. But now I have two copies of the same word, one regular and one with a stroke on it right on top of one another.
 
This normally wouldn't be an issue but I have to edit this info in Ai later - and there's a second problem. When I paste the bold text from Excel in Ai, the resulting word is broken up into individual text blocks for each letter. Instead of preserving the whole word as one editable text block, I now have to click on each letter to change it.
 
There is a catch 22 to these problems: These cells that I am copying from include bolded and regular text, and the regular text pasted into Ai without any problems (even the text blocks are preserved). So it's the bold text that is causing the problems
 
I have a feeling this has to do with how the individual cells are formated in Excel, but I have to copy data from many different cells made by many different people, so I am at a loss of what to do.
 
I have include a screen shot of what's going on with cells after I paste them in Ai. I have moved the oulined "5" up so you can see the regular "5" below it.