In lists there is an "Open with Access" option, I never thought much about this and continued using Excel. However we have a requirement to build an application with drag and drop functionality on a desktop application but to publish this to our Extranet. So I tried Access 2007, I simply created an Access database and connected a number of lists in a site on our Extranet to it and voila! You can use this in online or offline mode, it understands the links between the lists and will even give you a relationship diagram! Mine was a spiders web!

 Access 2007 looks much better also when editing an item in the table you get calendar functionality if it is a date/time field, if it is a lookup on another SharePoint list you get a drop down of the options!

I was really impressed it meant uploading and downloading data (using 2-way sync) for our desktop application was simple!