Excel spreadsheets are very commonly used for BOM management in industry. You can specify as many parameters about a part as you like, you can do on the fly calculations for cost estimates, you can put in the sizes and pad counts for manufacturing estimates, you can insert notes, you can assign hyperlinks to datasheets and part sources.
I use spreadsheets to communicate BOMs to and from PCBA companies. If you don’t give them a spreadsheet at the beginning, they’ll probably put it all in a spreadsheet and send it back to you for review anyway.
OpenOffice and Libre Office are free, extremely powerful tools; the spreadsheet programs have so much more untapped ability than typing numbers in cells and adding some of them up. I use Excel to design SMPS and certain analog circuits. Once you crystallize a design down to a set of functions, it’s really easy to adjust parameters to come up with something for different applications or available parts.