Let's reject purely commercial components at once. They also have their own niche in real life but in this case their usage is not reasonable. There are three good solutions among open-source components: extJS Grid, dhtmlxGrid, DOJO Grid (the first two of them are produced under double licenses: GPL | Commercial, the third one has BSD-like license).

ExtJS - All other things being equal, it has the largest amount of necessary files and some performance problems working with huge datasets.

The unclear situation with its licensing policy reduces the desire of using it (the moral aspect of project development under GPL which further on was shifted to a tougher license is on developer's head).
Let's leave making a smaller build for people who have more spare time.

DOJO grid - It seems to be ok, but there's no certainty about it due to absence of documentation.

dhtmlxGrid - the amount of code is relatively small, its examples and documentation, and, the main thing, working speed make this component our best card.

We'll take it, wrap up two, please.

We use a highly classified Excel file as a data source (in further examples, this highly classified Excel file will be replaced by a unclassified one obtained with the help of http://freebase.com - I recommend it when someone needs data for tests or demonstrations). Let's convert it into CVS to simplify further development.

I adore office packets: you save the file as “data with a separator , ”, and get “data with a separator ; ” - such a slight misunderstanding.
But saving was done, at least it's something.

Thus, settled: dhtmlxGrid + data