Hi,
I'm pretty new to queries but I'm a quick study. I'm making a tool in excel in which retrieves data for the files a user is working on.
Data is in a few of similar tables containing information about the files. I want to retrieve some of that data and combine it with a list of user's assigned files.
Some of the data in the sources is connected in a way that requires first getting a string from one table and match it with another from another table.

Basically I know I could:
A) Query all the files containing the data separately on a hidden sheet. Data could be easily looked up with macros for the user
B) Merge queries to get the information in one table. This is what I tried and I don't know a way to do this without making each merge separately to the last merge and match with a lot of custom columns.
Also in some tables the reference might be on any of 5 columns, and only way I know how to merge the data is with 5 different merges
C) Make queries in vba that retrieve the pieces of data one-by-one from each table for each file. I'm also having problems with this part as some data is in a MySQL-server

Would all of these take tons of time to refresh? Which of the options would be best, or is there a better way?
I'll probably ask a lot of followup questions once I know which path to follow

Thanks