Some time ago I've tried to get rid of flash when exporting to excel, back then my only option was to use server-side script or use TableTools and export to csv.
I want to present proof of concept that allows to export table to Excel's XLSX 2007 format.
http://live.datatables.net/pudavuya/1
I'm using sheetjs (http://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx). This is only basic example of what can be done. I'll try to add this to TableTools, but this can take time, because I'm still learning new API.
Same thing with PDF (http://github.com/MrRio/jsPDF)
Allan what do You think about this? Maybe this is future do TableTools?