Conclusion
I'm constantly amazed when I see environments where vital organizational data has been cordoned off into major Excel spreadsheets. No matter how great the spreadsheets are, they're not databases, and access to them is not easy. They require extensive VBA programming to manipulate. My observation is that VBA expertise is more difficult to come by than database expertise. Converting spreadsheets to XML format can constitute one step in the process of integrating them into enterprise data stores.