Looking inventory data from Excel

My brother Alex is one hell of a business apps developer. He's been for years using C/S tools and just a few months ago I convinced him of using ASP.NET, after some reticence he started to program in the .NET platform and it amazes me the various (somewhat small but certainly real life) apps he has crafted in this short period. Yet, Alex being mostly an alien to our O-O, XML, etc. hoopla, there is a number of things he hasn't been acquainted with. Last week, a customer asked Alex to create a tool that helped the customer salespeople to create proposals with Excel, mostly, the salesman didn't want to switch from Excel to a green terminal window to check product prices and stocks, I talked Alex about the Office 2003 Research Services and he (reluctantly again) agreed to give it a try, so we used the best part of yesterday and today afternoons discussing the architecture of the research pane (he knows a little about web services but nothing about XML) and then creating a couple of research services that do most of what his customer wants, Alex is impressed and even I am impressed with what we accomplished: it looks like we worked far longer than what we actually did. One point to note though, the Research Services SDK is indispensable to do this kind of job but it is somewhat awkward to use for me, moreover, it was completely irritating for Alex (who's a talented programmer who just doesn't know XML), besides creating the long XML response document is tedious: one could use a higher order API. All in all, my bro is starting to like Office 2003 and web services but still don't get what's the fuss about XML.