The database capabilities of Excel are very powerful. In fact, not only can Excel be used to create a simple searchable database, it also can be used to create a proper relational database.

While Microsoft Excel is widely recognized for its spreadsheet functionality and calculation capabilities, it’s often overlooked as a powerful tool for managing small to medium-sized datasets ...

You can create XML data from a Microsoft Excel 2003 worksheet or workbook, but you'll need to do some manual steps to get the data to conform to valid XML format.