Like the approach. We build our own tables views in the backend for basically the same. A lot of the stuff we did could (in theory i assume) come for free in GDocs

Google Docs is really a great starting point to see what exactly you need and where to go from there if you need. It's easy, free and just works.

and if you want to play further with your data have a look at google refine http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/

This looks amazing. Will take a good look