Can anyone help with this

At work we have been producing product price lists ourselves for our customers, to date the easiest way has been is to take the excel spreadsheet master then cut and paste it into illustrator and then lock the cells. Then to reduce the file size we have created PDF's which also makes them easier to move around. The problem with this is the time spent collating the 16 pages as we do not seem to be capable of producing a complete 16 page document that prints in the right order, fully collated.

Having now got the headed price list paper we were hoping that we could format the excel master so that we could tell the printer to print straight onto the paper in a uniform manner. However after many hours of picking at the metaphorical wallpaper edge setting print areas and making sure the cell count is the same on each page, we keep getting every page doing what it wants , not what we want it to do. We keep getting pages of different sized grids complete with "widows and orphans" that were not there to start with.

So far the the guide book has not pointed us in the right direction, so: are we expecting too much? Should we create the price list in a different software programme? Is there any blindingly brilliant website for dummy's out there in the ether that might help, or is the solution staring us right in the face?

Cheers in advance, a very Frustrated John Boy Saint