another excerpts question…

Hi,
I am attempting to place on another page a list of post titles or excerpts from the latest 5 or so… I don’t seem to understand how the excerpts work however (and I have read a number of posts about getting them to work so one can place them on the side of the index.php page… and I have made use of the help offered here
http://wordpress.org/support/3/7047
I think, after reading the posts here that there are two excerpts, one for RSS and the other for the blog posts. When I look at the _posts table, I notice that the _excerpt field is empty for each record…
I noticed this because I was attempting to access that table to get links and ‘excerpts’ from the latest posts to put on a different php page. But now that I know exerpts are for RSS (though I still don’t know why it is a blank field on my record sets) I beleive to do what I want to do, I will have to use CSS, create a class with a set amont of visible space and call the latest 5 posts or so with a link somehow… Am I making this more complicated than it need be? Is this a good tactic?? Does any of this make sense???
I can for the most part decipher php code, basic SQL, have css skills, and have been able to place the links list on another php page in a different directory using Dreamweaver MX application tools, and thought I could do the same with the ‘excerpts’… Sorry for the long post, but I guess what I am asking is for advice about both how to do this and whether it is the proper solution, or is there something else I am missing in the WordPress docs??
Thanks