Create reports from Excel workbooks?

I do testing of industrial equipment, collecting a lot of data along the way. Once I've calculated the performance metrics of existing systems, I do a cost analysis on proposed repairs or replacements.

I have a couple of goals in trying to streamline my spreadsheet process and make it more effective.

My worksheets usually end up with way more columns than I can view on the screen and that gets pretty cumbersome, so I want to develop input forms that will make data entry simpler. I've tried transposing the formats but they get even more difficult to handle that way. I just ran across the "Build a UserForm for Excel" pdf in this forum and I think that's going to help quite a bit.

Then for each of these types of projects I need to develop at least two report formats, one that will be comprehensive for each individual piece of equipment or subsystem that I'm analyzing, and another that's more of a summary of entire systems, such as a network of pumps all owned by the same customer. Ideally, this summary report would allow me to rank the subsystems by various criteria, such best ROI or most critical to operations. Format-wise what I'm looking for here is to strip away anything not relevant to decision makers, just reporting the important ID info and key results.

Finally, I'd like to be able to store all similar jobs in a single database so I can easily search through past results for comparative purposes when doing higher level analysis on new projects. I keep seeing the term "relational database" bandied about but don't really know if that's what I'm talking about or not.

Can I even do this in Excel? My understanding is that Access doesn't really allow you do do calculations.

I'm happy to go out and buy a book and get serious about studying up on this but don't even know where to begin. Excel Help and days of Googling have only led me down a lot of dead ends. Any direction would be greatly appreciated.