Is there a better way to design the workbook I receive and work with the data for reporting?|General Excel Questions & Answers|Excel Forum|My Online Training Hub

I’ll preface this post that I’m not an advanced Excel user and found the forum searching YouTube Excel videos in hopes of finding an answer and researching who to subscribe and take courses. I know there must be a better way to work with the Excel data and workbook that I’m provided and tasked to work with. I receive an Excel Workbook weekly with the main worksheet representing an inventory of approximately 7500 rows of equipment with column headers for Serial number, City, State, other location, and inventory information. Each week a list of equipment that have had issues such as a service call are added to the workbook on a worksheet labeled with mm/dd/yyyy for that week. The weekly worksheet has the same column headings as the inventory worksheet with an additional column for the reason the device was flagged that week. I believe the original file is a csv file before being added to the workbook. Typically, about 500 devices are flagged each week. As you can imagine the number of worksheets grows exponentially in the workbook. The person who provides the workbook uses a VLOOKUP and adds a column to the main inventory worksheet with the column header labeled with that week’s date and an “X” to indicate the device had an issue that week. I don’t see any other functions or automations. The number of columns in the main inventory worksheet is also increasing in columns for week after week of historical data. The ask of me each week is slightly different but essentially which devices by serial have been more problematic over time. Is there a pattern by model, what locations are experiencing the most issues etc. Filtering and sorting conditional formatting have been the go-to method handed down to accomplish reporting. Hopefully, someone would be willing to provide their insights on the best approach to be most efficient to manage and work with the data. Any direction on what to home in on to study and research is most appreciated. Is this about pivot tables? Can the reporting be done solely with pivot and is that the best approach? Is a dashboard the best approach? Should all the worksheets be in the workbook? Should all the weekly reports be in a local folder or in a shared then pulled into the workbook rather than putting all the worksheets into a workbook? There is access to SharePoint, PowerBI, and PowerApps but that is another learning curve. Appreciate any guidance and thank you.