PHP to HTML to Excel

I always seam to get google results from your forums while
searching for stuff so i thought i'd try my luck here.
I am totally unable to find any kind of help elsewhere.
I don't mind reading docs at all so if you think my problem
has been solved elsewhere please direct me there.

So here's the problem for you:

Background:
I am quite new to php but i managed to get this sort of
accounting system working for a company.
It's supposed to gather info from members, store it in a database
and present it in a nice manner to the bosses.

What i need to do:
They asked me for this feature: the members should fill out
a form with employee data and send it to HQ.
That's not a problem. I know hou to gather data from html forms
by using php and send it where i want.
BUT the Accounting Department needs to be able to modify this data
with ease. The only way that they're going to be able to do that is if
the data is presented in a nicely formated Excel table (within a web page, i thought)

The Problem:
I know Excel can export spreadsheets with interactivity to HTML.
I can open those pages, edit them to suit my needs and save them.
And IE would recognize them. (Firefox seams to not want to...)
But the problem is that they are sooo hard to read!
Excel exports ALL the data regarding the spreadsheet in a single row
that pretty much looks like this:

<param name=XMLData
value="&lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot;?&gt;
&lt; ... a lot of the same stuff ... /Workbook&gt;
">

Becouse I was curious I tried to read it. I soon realised that if you replace
all the ansi stuff (or whatever it is) and arrange it nicely you get something
that looks a lot like html tabels!
So the whole row (it's a single huge row, by the way) would look like this:

<Worksheet>
<Table>
<Row>
<Cell>
<Data>
This is some data
</Data>
</Cell>
</Row>
</Worksheet>

or something along those lines anyway...

So... Is there a tool that could do this automatically for me?
(the conversion from %lt to < i mean)
Or help me in any way?
Becouse the php syntax will be quite complex and i'd really hate to find out
that i have to work with PHP, HTML AND the Excel XML or whatever the hell
that thing is...

Any automated tools for this task?
Any hints on how i should go about if there aren't any tools for this?
A little bit of simpathy then?
Anything?

Hope i get some answers here.
Thank you in advance.