The reason I am so interested in your analysis process is because I wish to compare the effort involved with the results, and more importantly (for me), what kind of effort I would have to put in to achieve the same results.

I too have been using Excel but have become increasingly frustrated with its inefficiency, ie. all the scrolling and clicking. I can see that your programming experience has probably helped you a lot with automating things.

Recently I stumbled upon an open source statistical analysis software/programming language called R, which is supposedly what the professional scientific community uses. It seems to be much more efficient than excel, but with a steeper learning curve. Perhaps you will find it easier than I have as you have some programming experience. Here is the link to the official website:

http://www.r-project.org/index.html

In addition, a google search for “econometrics in R” will yield some introductory texts, that I think are very helpful.