Svmaxcel,

I agree with Jan Karel Pieterse you should probably look outside plain Excel. That being said if it needs to be Excel maybe you could try approaching the problem with Microsoft's PowerPivot / PowerQuery Excel Addins, which are able to work with higher data loads but also come with a learning curve. I am not sure if the higher performance of these Addins will be enough, but might be worth a try if you don't want to go to MS Access / SQL directly.

Kind regards,
Bernd