I am using Excel for almost 20 years. I understand your pain. And yes Accubid does have a learning curve. I like Accubid for larger complex jobs with a lot of alternates/breakdowns. It also depends on how often you need to update/change your estimate. Accubid may be tedious for smaller/straight forward jobs. What I have done is, I entered my unit prices in Accubid database as items. So for a quickie, use your unit prices with benefit of Accubid breakdowns. May be later I can explain you how to do it, if interested.
For a newbie, I would recommend using accubid tech support more often, which is free and very good. You call them and leave a message. They will call you back in half an hour or so. This delay is the most annoying part, but they solve almost all possible issues you may have. Accubid does have extensive training, I don't how much your firm would be willing to spend! I would suggest buying 1-to-1 online hours where you can ask the trainer direct question what you need and how to do it.
There is a way in Accubid to get the unit price from the bid you have entered. I would suggest you to enter a dummy job with different items you normally use in unit prices. For example, I entered 100 feet of EMT from different assemblies for EMT and came up with "3/4 inch EMT with Die Cast set screw fittings, threaded rod from steel" comes close to my unit price of 3/4 inch EMT. So I can start using "EMT DC SS T-ROD FROM STL - THHN" for all my EMT needs. Am I making sense? The ideal situation is to make your own assemblies. Above method is much quicker than making your assemblies, because IMHO the concept of making your own may not happen in near future or may never happen!
Also look for "Database Find ?" in Menu > Edit or use ?Ctrl+D?. The search feature is not versatile like google, but definitely helps finding items quickly.
