depends on how much data you want to pull in the query - if you run a query that returns over 65,536 rows of data, then you are right - it's going to be too big. but i was assuming that when you said you needed to "lookup" data from your data table, you meant that you wanted to look for certain criteria and only return the data that met that criteria. if this is what you want to do, i still think query would work for you, unless, as i stated before, your query results are larger then the excel spreadsheet can hold. keep in mind that if you use query to lookup data from your table, you don't need to have the table in excel.
btw, are you familiar with using query in excel, because you can really do much more with it than what i have briefly described to you in these posts.
good luck,
kevin