Does Framemaker present a way to update the contents of a table from a data source?

If using Excel, one other, albeit unsophisticated method, that works is importing by reference. You need to make sure there is only one worksheet in the Excel file and do all the formatting in Excel. You do end up with an empty paragraph return at the top of the table too. But it works.

ExtendScript has a nice XML object so if the datasource is XML (or you can export it to XML), then scripting the updates could be a good option.

There are several options, one to avoid:

1. Don't use Windows OLE (many reasons).
2. Export the spreadsheet to PDF, import that by reference. Be sure to include some stewardship info in the export object (ID, path, date), outside the hosting frame, so future maintainers can tell where it came from.
3. FM can be extended via script or FDK to query an enterprise database. I had that feature available in a prior position, and used it extensively.

Yes. Open the spreadsheet. Copy the table. In FrameMaker click Paste Special / Linked Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet (or something - my dialogue is danish)