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Hmmm. Excel has supported SQL queries against itself for at least 20 years. This includes select, insert, update, delete

Via MS Query? ADO? OLAP cubes? Care to elaborate for the newbs?

Yes, MSQuery. Here is the first of many results returned by Google after searching "query Excel spreadsheet" (I didn't bother reading it) http://www.exceluser.com/formulas/msquery-excel-relational-d...