How can I compare a value received from selenium web-driver to another value without hard-coding the other value?

I am currently having trouble finding the best way to compare values from a webpage collected by Selenium Web-Driver to another source of values.

Methods I have tried:

• Comparing the Web-Driver values to excel spreadsheet cells but this is too slow and would cause cell numbers to be changed when a new row is inserted
• Hard-Coding the values into the selenium tests, this method works but means that if the value on the webpage changes the value in the test has to be manually changed throughout

I have thought about the possibility of using a database and then requesting the values from a table but have not tried this yet.