Populating fields based on matching records in Excel

The quick background:
The ultimate result of this project is a report with information from
several different sources. Some information has to do with the company, which
are all one-shot fields from one of 2 tables (2 because there are 2 data
sources and one changes). The rest is data regarding the top 5 competitors,
whose data is all in their own table.
I have to export a replica of this Access report to Excel in order to get
information from the rest of the project members (who, of course, does not
have Access, and we don't have time to build a web interface). No problems so
far - my master report exported just fine, and populating the template was
easy.

But soon I'll need to be able to get information from the Excel template
back into my Access tables. So the question is a two-parter:
1) The most technically simple way I can think of to populate my tables with
the updated information is to bring over all fields in a hidden Excel
worksheet, only show the fields I need to show on their template, and then
assemble the complete record in Excel before exporting it to a new table,
which would take the place of my old table. Is there a better way of doing
this? Can Access do a match and just pull over certain fields?
2) Related to the last question, I have to query to get my top 5
competitors, so I'll only be getting information back on those top 5 and not
all competitors. Is there some alternative to bringing over the entire
competitor table into Excel to do a LOOKUP (based on *2* fields, as both the
type ID and the brand name have to match)?