Setting data type from imported data

I find importing data from excel and then setting the data type for each column to be rather excruciating. Is there a way that I can do a select all and change them all to a specific value at once? I have 200 attributes and some are coming in as integers when I want reals, or polynominal vs date, etc... However 90% of it a real, and then I can change the remaining ones as oppose to doing every single one. Perhaps organizing the data by data type would be helpful so I dont have to search every column to find every single one that is different.