I just wrote a little tool for one of our customers and am also publishing it for others to enjoy. SpreadButler is a little perl service, running on your webserver providing the content of spread sheets to your web application. I have successfully integrated it with silverstripe using the short code interface.
So if your company is keeping data in excel which should be published on the website, this will make your life much simpler ...
more details on
http://github.com/oetiker/spreadbutler
enjoy
tobi