The excel addin is currently very limited in scope as it can only work if all items in the sheet are in development state. It should allow attributes like Estimated cost, Qty, Spare, Rec. Spare, Apvl, CofC, Ref. Only, Pcwp, Mtr, Notes and Ebom custom attributes to be updated on released items similar to the web UI.
Primary use case is cost as that can change at any time so being able to update that on a released items would be a big time saver.