What's actually going on
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 weekly 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, then copy the result into an email or document. Each step on its own is small. Doing all four by hand, every week, is what actually eats the time — not any single one of them.
It stays manual because the four steps usually live in different places — an export button somewhere, a working tab you rebuild from scratch, a total you retype, an email written fresh — rather than one chain that runs itself. Every week you're rebuilding the chain, not just running it again.
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, in a second tab, build the reshaped or filtered view using formulas or a pivot table that reads from the first tab, not by retyping numbers by hand. Total that second tab with a formula, not a calculator. The weekly report becomes copying one finished tab, not four separate manual passes stitched together under pressure.
If the export changes shape slightly each week — a different column order, an extra row, a new file each time — look at Power Query, also shown as Get & Transform on Excel's Data tab. It's built specifically to record the reshape-and-combine steps once and re-run them against a new export automatically, instead of you re-doing the filtering by hand every time (Microsoft: About Power Query in Excel). 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 — or if the shape changes so much each time 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 feeding formulas, instead of retyping numbers between tabs, is usually a short job and removes most of the manual time on its own, with nothing new to buy or learn beyond what's already in the tool.
Connect it if the export itself could be scheduled, or the finished report could land somewhere on its own — a shared folder, a recurring reminder that pulls the latest file — so the only manual step left is a final glance before it goes out.
Convert to a properly scheduled or scripted job only once the report is stable — weekly or more often, same shape each time — and the "what happens if I'm away" question genuinely matters. Building automation around a report that's still changing shape every month usually means rebuilding the automation just as often as you'd have rebuilt the report by hand.
What "done" looks like
Done means the weekly report takes minutes, not the better part of an afternoon, regardless of whether a person or a saved query did the reshaping. You'd know it's working if you could hand the report to someone else with a one-line instruction — open, refresh, send — and 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 yet, whatever the tab looks like now.