> Let each piece in the system do what it's good at. Althought I strongly dislike the idea of introducing Excel in any equation, I wholehearthly agree with tha

> Let each piece in the system do what it's good at. Althought I strongly dislike the idea of introducing Excel in any equation, I wholehearthly agree with that quoted statement of yours. However, if I were you, I would use csv format. It can be easily read/edit from Excel if that's a strict requirement, and in that way, you can keep a grepable plain text versioned in the repository (the csv itself). The best of two worlds I guess. Also, from the top of my head, the Python standard library has a module for reading CSV, so less dependencies too.