[mtmail]

I'd move to MS Access. It allows reporting via a nice user interface, querying with Visual Basic but also SQL (from VBA calls or from outside). https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/client-developer/ac...

Then play with an exteral desktop app writing SQL queries against the database. For example https://www.dbvis.com/database/msaccess/ I'm sure there's open source software doing something similar.

After a couple of months you can go different directions: move database from MS Access to another database engine (MySQL, Postgresql, Sqlite, etc) while the SQL queries should still work. Or build up knowledge in VBA to query directly from MS Excel.

Another factor will be employability, what knowledge will be useful if you switch jobs, and working with collegues, will anybody else be able to maintain what you've build.

[VladTheImpalor]

Thank you for your suggestions! Two comments recommended Access, so I will look into it. Your progression is extremely logical, so thank you for it. I think this is the way I will go. From within Excel, the issue is I have several files, so will need to either combine them into one big one, or link them together.