I can understand how it works for you. I know you deal in Excel data a lot and seeing your description above it makes sense for you. Definitely not knocking what you're saying. It's actually a nice solution to your particular situation.

Wouldn't work as well developing the template, but getting your data into an existing template it does make sense.

I might still try to move the excel data to a mysql or other database and work with it that way. I think it might end up giving your more options over how to use the date, but maybe that's just me. Sorry if anything I said above made it sound like I thought what you were doing wasn't good. I think it is in your situation. It's not a general solution for all, but it's a solution for people like yourself dealing with a lot of excel data.