That monthly ritual you described, export, reformat, filter, formula, paste, is not a process. It's a tax on your time. And you are right to question whether recording macros is still the only path forward.
Macros were a reasonable answer fifteen years ago. They let you record keystrokes and replay them, but they broke the moment a column shifted or a data source changed. You mention that you never had much success making them work for others, and that is the core problem. Macros are brittle. They demand that you think like a programmer, even when you just want to think like an analyst. The real breakthrough of recent advances is not that automation got faster, it is that automation got smarter. You no longer have to predefine every step. You can describe what you need and let the tool figure out the rest.
For your specific case, the copy-paste out and the paste into GP are fast enough. You said so yourself. The friction is everything in between: the reformatting, the filtering, the formula insertion, the repetition across tabs. That middle section is where AI-native spreadsheet tools now shine. Instead of recording a rigid sequence of clicks, you can train a model on one month's workflow and let it infer the pattern. Next month, you drop in the new export, and the tool applies the same logic, without you touching a single cell. It adapts to column name changes. It handles missing data. It does not panic when a header label varies by one character.
What this means for you is practical: you can stop treating your monthly routine as a chore to be endured. The technology to absorb that middle section exists today. You do not need to learn VBA. You do not need to debug a recorded macro that fails on the third tab. You need a tool that watches you work once and then offers to take over. That is the direction the industry has moved, and it is the direction that respects your time.
The question is not whether automation is possible. It is whether you are ready to let the repetitive part go so you can focus on what actually needs your judgment. Start with one tab next month. Let the tool handle the formatting and the formulas. If it works, you will wonder why you waited.