Some “obvious” research workflows & shortcuts that everyone already knows:

(once someone tells you)

The general principle: most productivity is lost in *transporting* work-in-process, not in doing the actual work.

immediately pulls PDF tables into Excel. Avoid manual data entry at all

Excel > Insert > Data from Picture lets you take a photo of any table and pull in data directly from the PNG or JPG file. Again, avoid manual data entry at all costs.

The Table Capture extension by @georgemike lets you copy HTML tables into Google Sheets or Excel. (Noticing a theme here?)