Fastest way to automatically manipulate excel files, ideally without opening them.

I’m (re)designing an automated system we have that uses macros to:

a) extract info from an individual “instruction” file (using VBA class variables to store the data)

b) creates folders, copies over files, updates named ranges in certain files, copies certain tabs from certain files into other files, creates .csvs of certain tabs within files. Lots of stuff, but all essentially creating new excel files and using their contents to manipulate or create more excel files.

c) repeats for multiple other individual files

Basically, a lot of using vba to open some or other file, edit it, save it, repeat. This can only really go as fast as Excel can run, since everything gets bottlenecked by eg. opening and saving some large Excel file.

I’m sure there must be a way to read / manipulate certain parts of Excel files without necessarily opening them in instances of Excel, which is the major time/resource consuming bit. Is python with the Pandas library any faster than VBA for this sort of thing? Everyone is always praising PowerQuery but not sure how it could potentially fit in here.