excel to pages

Apple's Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are not clones of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, so do not expect all of Excel's functionality to be translated into Numbers. Not all of Numbers features are supported in Pages tables either, though you can copy/paste a Numbers sheet into a Pages table.

Don't rule out a screen capture of the Excel spreadsheet, and then drag/drop that image into a Pages document and rotate it 90 degrees.

Pages is a word-processing and page layout program, more akin to Microsoft Word than to Excel. As far as I'm aware it won't open spreadsheet documents.

Numbers (also an iWork application) opens Excel spreadsheets, although there may be differences in formatting and fonts, and some more complex Excel equations may not be available in Numbers.

I would try saving your Excel spreadsheets as ordinary .xlsx files and then opening them on your Mac using Numbers.