Yes, the data is stored on the phone so it is offline and you can access it with your App.
Depending on your search requirements, you could just as easily use a CSV file (comma separated text file), again stored on the phone. Also, depending on how many plants there are, you can use TinyDb.
In a convoluted way we can because Excel supports the CSV format. In such a process, we have to ensure that Excel is talking UTF-8 in many cases, as that's the default in App Inventor.