Excel >> Access >> ASP -- HELP, PLEASE!

Hey, my name is Josh and I'm (obviously) new here.

I just started working in an office full of financial analysts whose mission requires that they publish data from Excel spreadsheets on the web. Currently this is being done in what seems to be a very inefficient way: the columns whose data must be published are named using the convention "datatable.fieldname" and a special macro that has been written specifically for this purpose is then run, which creates fields "fieldname" in an MS Access datatable "datatable". Once the data is in Access, XML documents are written *manually* for each specific table to be displayed on the website. The XMLs contain the title for the table, the title of each individual column, and the datatable and fieldname for the data in each column. After the user specifies the directory containing all the XMLs for the spreadsheet (each spreadsheet usually contains the data for multiple tables, and thus multiple XMLs are required) in the "client" field in the spreadsheet properties, another macro is run which parses all the XMLs in that "client" folder and creates a .asp document for each chart and FTPs it to our webservers. There is almost no fault tolerance and troubleshooting is extremely difficult since the macros were written in-house about a decade ago (or so I'm told) and little attention was paid to such details.

I am the "new guy" at the office here and I'm really just doing this as a summer job, but I absolutely cannot stand doing things a certain way just because "it's always been done that way." The rest of the IT staff (two people) does not seem to have the inclination to improve things. I am convinced that there has to be an easier way to accomplish what seems like a simple task.

I know that one solution is to write new macros, but I have very little programming background (my only expertise is in MATLAB, although I am not opposed to learning some VB if it will help). My experience is mostly in hardware/OS/network diagnostics, repair, and installation. I have a good understanding of computers in general but not in databases and web publishing/serving specifically. Please let me know if you have any suggestions that will help me streamline the publishing process. Thanks in advance!