The world in an excel spreadsheet

Dottourism blog brought my attention to a link to the World Gazetteer that provides global population data by location - going as deep as city, town and metropolitan areas. Can be used to mash together with Google maps to add population data to map data. I haven't quite figured out exactly what I would do with all this data - but am eerily attracted to the notion of having an excel spreadsheet with the population numbers for each city.