Best solution for publishing table/grid?

Hi all, experienced programmer here, but novice when it comes to building web pages.

Background

The primary page of my site is a directory which is essentially just a table of data (imagine an Excel sheet with about 40 columns and 40 lines).

I put together the info in Excel, at the moment my strategy for publishing is as follows:
1) edit the data in Excel
2) save as CSV
3) convert CSV to XML
4) upload XML file to server
5) XML file is referenced by a Spry table on page

I can repeat steps 1 to 5 as often as I want, any time I want to edit the source data.

Question

I am not convinced about the wisdom of having the web page w/ Spry table and the XML in separate files. If the web page is called a.php referencing file b.xml , will Google see a.php and b.xml as part of the same set of information? Will Google even see the content of b.xml and index it? The content of my table needs to be indexed, it's the essence of that page.

Is there an easier way to do this?

I'd like to have some kind of table / datagrid object on the web page that allows the user to sort by clicking column headers.

If I can keep my master list in Excel, that would be ideal, as I sometimes may need a research assistant to make edits. But if it would save me a lot of time, I could pull the info into a web page designer like DreamWeaver as a one-off and make edits directly in the designer.

I can still choose any development environment at this stage. Not locked into anything. This is really a hobby project to bring my development skills into the 21st century.

All advice / orientation welcome.

A quick Google of Spry tables suggests that the data is being loaded dynamically with Javascript, in which case this is far from ideal in terms of SEO.

A better option would be to use php to load the data directly from the CSV file on the server side, outputting the html page complete with tabulated data. See fgetcsv for one possible way of doing this.

For improved performance you could cache the result of the CSV to html table conversion, and then check file modification dates on the server to determine when the script needs to reconstruct the table data when you upload a new CSV file.

You can still use Javascript to enable sorting by columns. As an example, there's a jQuery plugin that does this: docs.jquery.com/Plugins/Tablesorter

Jag, thanks for the ideas, much appreciated.

So I'll stick with a plain HTML table to be sure about the indexing.

I really like that table sorting class, and will use it for sure.