You can easily type directly in the table if you wish, but you probably won't want to do that for a large table. The only trick is to ensure that the columns in your spreadsheet match those in the table. You might ask why I chose to use Access instead of Microsoft SQL Server. I suppose you'll have to ask a real programmer that question. For me, Access is very simple to prototype in, and it is easy to migrate data from Access to Microsoft SQL Server.
Access also offers more power for doing Web sites than most people think.
You start to see some performance degradation after getting several concurrent users at a time, but this is actually hard to do on a small site. Consider our example of a quotes database that offers up a quote each time the page is refreshed. Say it takes 1 second to get the quote from the database, and then we close the connection. The other issue is that I would have a hard time putting a tiny Microsoft SQL Server database up on my column's Web page for you to download. Having said all that, I encourage you to check out Microsoft SQL Server 7.0.