Yep ... their VBA version does exactly what my older Access VBA code did. Also allowed for read & write. But as I've mentioned ... it was horribly slow.
Will give their ARX a try, seeing as it's "free but limited". If it's any good then I'd like to use that.
BTW, ACad has something like my ODBC idea (the other way round):
http://forums.augi.com/forumdisplay.php?f=338
Basically it can link objects inside a drawing to an ODBC database and Synchronize the values within. Unfortunately it only displays the data in text (not a tag block's attributes). Maybe it would be easier to simply revisit this "very old and nearly forgotten" function of AC.
Edit: Just tried the ARX version for 2008. Not too bad, it's down to a one click operation for import (a bit more for export). Trying this on a copy of one floor level on a current project (72 doors on this level) it takes about 20sec to generate the XLS & about the same to import the changes back into the DWG. You can actually see how it "fills-in" the spreadsheet. Sounds very close to the same speed I got using Access & VBA ... only then I was working on a much larger project (this one's a hotel, the previous was a multi-use conglomerate building with doors ranging from 200 to 900 per level).
To show the difference in speed using my LISP to save & load to & from a CSV file ... the same drawing (with 72 doors) takes 5 sec to save the room tags, window tags & door tags with one click (there's 53 rooms & 22 windows). And excel takes no time whatsoever to update the tables from these CSV files ... what I'd like to do for mine is to directly place into an XLS (like Xanadu does) except not using VBA (or as they do ActiveX) because this is going to be discontinued and I think this is where the time issue comes in.