I solved my problem. All previous attempts had given me either only the first row or a corrupted table that lost the first pipe character of the table after the first row.
The problem seems to be in the way text edit and word and excel create text files, but I don't know. Anyway, this is how I did it.
I put \n in the last cell of each row, then saved the excel file as text. I opened the resultant file in word and then copied it into pico and saved it from there.
Using - load data infile "path to file" into table mytable; - gave me the result I needed.
My excel file was 250 rows. I don't know if pico has a size limit.