Thanks for the pointers/suggestions. I'm not familiar with some of the techniques / functionality you mention, so will go away and do some reading up.

I have negative memories about using Access databases on a network share (admittedly the older versions) with databases getting corrupted. But even more recently, I found creating a linked SQL Server table in Access 2010 yielded unreliable data updates (retrieves from SS were fine) even when pasting in only 20-30 records from Excel with only some of the rows making it into the SQL Server table for some strange reason that I didn't have time to get to the bottom of. In the end I ended up importing the Excel file directly using SSMS.

Obviously that works fine for ad-hoc updates with me as the developer/dba, but not fine for finance users who need something simple that just works straight from Excel.

I just tried creating an ODBC linked table from within Excel 2010 and it uses Microsoft Query to define the query. I just noticed the "Records\Allow Editing" option for the first time in MS Query. It works within MS Query and I managed to save a new record back to the database. However, when I choose to return the data to Excel in a data table, although it allows me to edit the existing rows and insert new records within Excel, I can see no way of pushing the new/changed records back to SQL Server from within Excel itself. Does this bit need to be done programmatically with e.g. VBA?

The other idea I've been toying with is to create a link to the database table from SharePoint and then use a SP list or Infopath form to allow editing, but didn't get this to work on my first attempt so need to have another go. But in all honesty would probably prefer an Excel solution over the SP one.