Export list of Sitecore items as Excel (or other formats)

Question

I noticed that sitecore has the option of exporting users in an Excel format.

I need to have similar functionality for exporting 'participations', (a users can enlist to take part in an 'event', and if their entry is approved via a sitecore workflow, a 'participation' item is created in the content tree)

Since mostly everything in Sitecore is in essence based on items, and I want to export items to Excel, my question is - what are some of the best ways of doing this?

Questions:

1. Is there a way to re-use this functionality for regular items?
2. Would it be a good idea to create a custom admin page (any tips on doing this?) which has some custom code that reads the items from the database using the API?
3. are there sitecore plugins/shared source projects that can help me achieve this?

Or does anyone have a better idea? - would it be better to just store the participations in SQL? I'm mostly doing it this way because I want to make use of the 'free' functionality offers, for example workflow, but if that leads to me using anti-patterns please shoot me ;)

Answer 1

Link is different now: https://marketplace.sitecore.net/en/Modules/Advanced_System_Reporter.aspx

P.S. Couldn't leave a comment to original answer as I don't have enough reputation. Oh well :)

Answer 2

Found a most excellent shared source module which does exactly this (and much more)! Basically it allows you to configure (and easily extend, if you need to) any kind of table based report on 'items'.

The report module shows up as an application in the sitecore menu (like the user manager tool) and comes with features such as xml,csv, xls export. It's also really easy to set up, once you get the hang of it.

http://trac.sitecore.net/AdvancedSystemReporter