Exporting data to Microsoft Excel is well-supported in SharePoint and makes graphing and printing convenient (via the Print with Excel and Chart with Excel options). But it's also possible (and may often be desirable) to export data to Excel just for the sake of manageability. The Excel Export function creates an Excel Web query linking to the original data. In this way, you can create spreadsheets that will accept data, and then push that data to SharePoint.

This can be done by generating an Excel spreadsheet, then linking the spreadsheet to SharePoint (by using Export and Link to Excel from a Datasheet Task Pane). Once this is done, data can be entered into the spreadsheet and pushed from the spreadsheet to Excel with the Synchronize List option.