are you sure the data table is getting passed in with column names?  this may not be very eligant but if you write the file to a csv or txt file and the open the file without the “contains header checked” then the first record will contain the column names.

I also see that the basic excel has a get column name function so perhaps you write the data table to csv open in with basic excel (which is a light weight excel reader) and use get column name function followed by a loop for the values.

Appreciate those suggestions!  Ultimately I suppose I could just add the column names as the first row of data and handle that logic.  Kind of a weird hoop but it works!  Thank you!

In case you have an option to use csv:

Just imported a csv to a data table and the first row was only headers. Screen shot shows data in first 3 columns at row index 0. 

Hope this helps!