Linking vs importing an Excel table (1 Viewer)

I have a number of Excel worksheets to keep some basic data in, mainly because it's just easier and nicer to maintain data in Excel rather than going into Access tables, I use the filter/sort/formulas of Excel to maintain it, and also because there are people who will have to edit it that aren't familiar with Access.

At the moment I've been linking to these worksheets as that seems to be the simplest way, and any changes made in Excel are automatically reflected in the queries Access is running. But some of my queries are very slow, which I'm thinking is down to the linking, as I don't think it's possible to index linked tables and Access is constantly having to go out and fetch the data.

When generally is it best to import an Excel sheet, rather than linking to it? And if I did that, how would I make sure I always had the latest version available to Access?

Thanks,

What you want to avoid is having multiple copies or visions of the same data, since in that case you need to keep track of which version or copy is authoritative.
I believe you will find that as the size and complexity of your data grows, then Access is "easier and nicer."