Help restructuring a reporting process

Hello,

I am not sure if this would be better placed in Office Development, as it also has a lot to do with Microsoft Office applications and VBA.

First of all I would highly apreciate some criticism or advice on how to restructure a process previously developed on how to store data and make the according reports.

The current process: (Reports and data is used to overview the Production in the company)

Till today we have been using only excel to store data and make reports from it. However the sheets start to become very large and so do the scripts. Recently the first sheets & scripts stopped working.

We have 2 people working in the department. They both maintain a sheet that includes all contracts we have signed. Their job is to fill in a date into the according column once a state of production has been reached.

The Excel sheet has counted the days between the dates to find out data as for example Average Production time of Providers, Employees & between states of production.

My plan:
I wanted to import the excel data the send me into an Access table every week. (If possible later on create a form on a server or their client that allows them to add & change specific entries on the database sheet on our server - But in that case a MySQL Database might be the better option)

I want to use Excel to create all the reports and graphs, however I do not want to copy & paste all the data from the database into the sheet & then make the calculations. I want to connect to the Access Sheet or MySQL Database, using VBA, and make all the necessary calculations & then only output to the excel sheet the results.

My Problems:
I am not sure if Access is the right option in the first place?
I have no idea how to access an Access or MySQL Database using VBA. ( I would highly appreciate some links to some useful tutorials or good posts for that - I have looked in Google and the Search funktion yet havn't quite found something that I could follow)

Thanks alot for all your help!!!
Best regards
Nik

In a nutshell I would recommend looking into Sql Server database/SQL Server Reporting Services - that would give you lots of flexibility with either front/back end development and actual usage.

Thanks for your reply!

I guess I will be looking into those options then.
Thanks!