Excel's ODBC connection functionality - general questions of how it works?

[-AJ-]

Thinking of moving a couple of linked spreadsheets into a database model instead.
However, I have a lot of non-technical uses who can just barely use Excel but having them use something like MS Access would be out of the question. (or OOBase/MySQL as we don't have MS Access)

Because of this I want to keep Excel as the main user interface for reporting and was thinking of using ODBC connections for this but I've not used it before and wondering if it's suitable.

1)If I build the query, import the data into an Excel file and save that... is the data persistent? Will it still be there after closing & opening the file or would users have to select a query every time?

2)Can I use it as a source for Excel's charts (non-pivot) and is it easy to automate similar to Excel's regular tables using structured referencing?

3)Can I easily append an excel table for calculated columns based on the database data or would it be best to include such calculations in the database model itself?

4)I understand the queries are read only? Is there any possible data entry method to write to the database using excel, rather than a form within the DBMS?

5) The database files themselves will be stored on a shared network, but does each local machine need to have the DBMS software installed to be able to access the data via excel?