I Hate Rework :P

I consider myself detail oriented.  But occasionally, technology manages to take the driver's seat and I am lulled into a sense of false security.  For example, MS Excel has long been the bane of my existence.  I'm pretty much "self-taught" meaning "what happens if I do this???" and once upon a time when I tested for a temp agency my Excel scoring was curious to say the least.  Certain aspects are "beginner", "intermediate", and "advanced".  I scored very high in both beginner and advanced, but failed miserably in intermediate.  Go figure.  My last job I was part of a development team that designed and built a Excel-based template to simplify and improve a work process.  While the finished product was a work of art, and it delivered all we had ever hoped, GETTING to that finish line was a major deal to me in terms of teaching me everything I never knew about Excel.   But I digress.....
I receive a report once a month from the AKC for all titles earned by Field Spaniels.  This is a new "job" for me, so I am still attempting to learn what to do.  There is a lot of information contained within this report that I don't need, and I have figured out how to shrink irrelevant columns or cells so I only have to look at the bits and pieces I need:  Name of the dog, the title it earned, the breeder's name, the sire's name, and the dam's name.  Now.....somewhere along the line I should have learned how to merge each month's report so that I can just have one, big excel report.  I should also be able to reorganize the lists so that all of the dogs bred by one breeder will group together.  Or all dogs sired by one stud dog.  Or one brood bitch.
Well now, that might just be too simple.  Or too complicated, I don't know.
I did ask a "techie" friend for help and received a rapid-fire response that went in one ear and out the other.  I don't learn by listening alone.  I need a hands-on lesson, with someone to walk me through  each step.  So, I have had to resort to opening a Word document, and I have started three lists and am maintaining them manually.
For some reason this afternoon I decided to CHECK MY WORK.  Why?  Because I had issues with my Word document when I was cutting/pasting and discovered that I had managed to DELETE nearly 1/3 of my year-to-date completed report!  So I "did the math" and discovered I had 70 titles under the breeder and 70 titles under the brood bitch...but 69 under stud dog.  Well, I may not be Einstein, but I do know it takes both a mother and a father to make a title-winner.
So, I started to search for all my past year's AKC reports.  There have been six.  It took me nearly two hours to finally locate the missing listing, and of COURSE it was in the very last report.
Next month, and all subsequent months I will endeavor to ensure my work is accurate so I don't have a repeat of this!  As I said, I hate rework!  If I was able to fully utilize Excel, I might be better off, but then again, it could totally mess me up and I might make more mistakes, just quicker!  We can't have that, now can we???