Help! Automation of Data Retrieval

[Vince, Pt. II]

Hey all, I have an issue that I think some of you may be familiar with and could help point me in the right direction for further learning.

TL;DR version: where can I go to teach myself about designing a script/program/what have you to automatically take data from one format (we'll call this location the internet, generally speaking; I end up having to get tons of data from weird sources because my company is not very well organized) and dump it somewhere I can use it, like Excel or Access?

I have recently been leveraged into a business analyst role with little formal training; it's right up my alley, but I am basically making stuff up as I go. Most of my work is in Excel and Business Objects, but I am trying to transition a lot of what we do to Access, as the quantity of data we deal with lends itself much better to a true database than just dumping millions of cells of data into Excel. Unfortunately I am learning Access as I go, so the transition could probably go much smoother.

In any case, I have two different problems I would like to tackle and I think the solution should be somewhat similar for both:

1. I have been given custodianship of several pre-existing reports that I have to build from other reports by hand; I will get an excel spreadsheet, and end up manually manipulating the data and updating charts (essentially taking the current weekly totals from a large set of data and appending it to an ever-growing excel summary worksheet, cutting away the actual data to keep file size to a minimum). It typically takes very little time (30 minutes, tops), but there has to be a better way. My end goal is to build that database and run a simple append query, but in the meantime any tips for automating this process short of some complex macros?

2. I have been tasked with creating a new resource that will summarize many of our disparate reports in one place - a dashboard, if you will. Unfortunately all of the data I will need comes from all over the place, and some of it I will not have access to except via a web browser. Do you know of a resource where I can teach myself how to automate a data collection process?

I have a couple years of collegiate computer science under my belt, so I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty and learning some honest-to-goodness programming - though my current skill set there is extremely rusty and was not very robust to begin with.