In an oracle database I would like to export to excel format a table with a particular filter. I would like to output only the rows containing the most recent date per section. How can I do this on FME?

The most efficient is to let Oracle do the filtering for you, e.g using a SQLCreator with something like the following:

SELECT *
  FROM (SELECT c.*,
               rank() over (partition by "Section" order by "Date" desc) rnk
          FROM "MyOracleTable" c)
 WHERE rnk = 1

Then send the output to an Excel writer.