VladTheImpalor

I'm a mechanical engineer maintaining component 'part lists' in a number of Excel files. These lists contain the specifications of every component in our systems (pumps, valves, heat exchangers etc.)

The problem is, Excel is useless at answering things like "How many components do we buy from Acne Corp?" or "What is the total cost for all components in Subsystem ABC?" I have to do it all manually for the moment.

But, every time I look into databases, it's either MS Access, which uses VBA for querying (which I'd like to avoid) or Databases with so much boilerplate involved that I feel like it's not something that I could implement over a weekend.

I've worked with SQL before (way back in the days of Borland C++), and am happy to implement something, but what is the bare minimum way of graduating from Excel to something more robust I can run queries against? I'm not a programmer, so the lower the barrier for entry, the happier I'll be. I'm open to all options.