SharePoint lists are great for storing information and perfornming all sorts of agregation and analysis. There is a lot of features that help managing data within a list. In some cases list item in the list is not going to stay in this form all the time, business users may need this item to become a report or a document that will now participate in a manual workflow.
One of the interesting challenges I had in a past, which one of the recent clients brought up is the ability to create Word documents based on the template right from the sharepoint list. This unique and neat idea resulted in ShareMuch Word Document Generator that we have developed here at Bluekarbon; this screencast will help you to understand how this was done from the development point of view.
And here is the source code for the sample project discussed.
Here is an interesting link on a topic:
http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word/archive/2007/01/18/xml-mapping-with-word-sharepoint.aspx
