What's actually going on
It's Friday. The export is open, the filter is half done, and the email hasn't been started.
You did this last Friday. You'll do it again next Friday.
This is an extremely normal way for a weekly report to work, and it's fixable in stages.
You don't need to script anything to make real progress.
The report usually breaks down into the same four steps, done by hand from scratch every time.
Export the raw data from wherever it lives. Reshape or filter it into the layout you actually need. Total or summarise it. Copy the result into an email.
Each step on its own is small. Doing all four by hand, every week, is what eats the time.
It stays manual because the four steps live in different places. An export button somewhere, a working tab you rebuild from scratch, a total you retype, an email written fresh.
Every week you're rebuilding the chain, not running it.
The smallest fix you can do today
Before automating anything, separate the steps you're currently doing in one pass.
Export first, into its own untouched tab or file.
Then build the reshaped or filtered view in a second tab, using formulas or a pivot table that reads from the first tab. Nothing retyped.
Total that second tab with a formula, not a calculator.
The weekly report becomes copying one finished tab, instead of four manual passes stitched together under pressure.
If the export changes shape slightly each week, look at Power Query. This includes a different column order, an extra row or a new file each time. It's also shown as Get & Transform on Excel's Data tab.
It's built to record the reshape-and-combine steps once and re-run them against a new export automatically (Microsoft: About Power Query in Excel). The filtering stops being something you redo by hand.
It's available from Excel 2016 onward, though the exact menu location differs between desktop and web versions. Check your version before relying on the same steps in both.
When it's worth keeping, cleaning, connecting, or converting
Keep doing it by hand if the report is genuinely rare, monthly or less. Keep doing it if the shape changes so much that a fixed formula or query would need constant rework. Sometimes a person's judgement really is the cheapest option.
Clean it if the four steps above aren't separated yet. One flat table feeds formulas instead of numbers being retyped between tabs. Setting it up is usually a short job. It removes most of the manual time, with nothing new to buy or learn.
Connect it if the export itself could be scheduled. The finished report could also land somewhere on its own, like a shared folder or a recurring reminder that pulls the latest file. Then a final glance before it goes out is the only manual step left.
Convert to a properly scheduled or scripted job once the report is stable, weekly or more often. It needs the same shape each time, and the "what happens if I'm away" question must genuinely matter. A report that still changes shape every month forces the automation to be rebuilt. That can happen about as often as rebuilding the report by hand.
What "done" looks like
Done means the weekly report takes minutes, not the better part of an afternoon, whether a person or a saved query did the reshaping.
A one-line instruction would let you hand it to someone else: open, refresh, send. They could actually do it.
If it still needs you specifically to remember which columns to filter and how to total them, the fix isn't finished. That's true whatever the tab looks like now.
The question in the back of your mind deserves an answer on a quiet Friday, not on the one where you're away.