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Tough questions. Trackmaster is my source for charts, not to be taken as an endorsement as I'm sure what you're already using would be fine too. CJs tip is great to join files, jot it down for yourself, I remember that trick was the only way I was able to push a massive amount into Excel power pivot without it choking.
There are VBA routines you can put together to automate importing a whole folders worth of data into an Access db. If you're willing to work through frustrations (and being a horseplayer I'm sure you are) then much of this stuff is well within capabilities. I would say for anyone even kicking around the idea most definitely make a new years resolution to learn more about Excel, Access, VBA, macros etc. It's rewarding to gain the skills even if it's not just racing you may end up researching other sports or whatever. There are good books out there, tons of tutorials online, I'm sure people on this board will help sometimes too.
For making product I use SQL Server, Access and Excel. For research, I will pull data out of the production SQL DB which at any point is live and current each day, put it into an Access db, play around with queries in there and then last of all bring subsets of that into Excel. So the final stop for research is Excel for me.
How 'many' workbooks varies, probably half-dozen or more along the way. Just to setup for research I'm constantly moving around data because workbooks get huge and bloated from formulas and I want to start fresh sometimes with just 'values'. Formulas in excel create overhead, especially lookups. Sometimes you use 20 columns of formula to get the data how you want it to be and then finally paste the 'values only' to a new workbook to release memory. If you just want to use one app then Excel can practically be used as a db these days with its million row limit since 2007.
It depends on your requirements too, if by research you mean you personally need a live db for researching tomorrows card then it's going to be a challenge to keep it current, again in that case you have the nightly importing piece. If you can use old data like from 2012-2013 and research with that to gain some useful insights then it's more practical.
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