Central Data Sheet efficiency

Hoping that someone with some in depth technical knowledge of Excel can help me out with a query.

We issue Finance Tracker spreadsheets to projects in our organisation, and then link them back to a central sheet that we use for monitoring and reporting. There are maybe 40-50 cells in each spreadsheet that we need to pull in to our central sheet, but they’re spread around the tracker and so are generally linked individually, and we’re now approaching 120 trackers that need to be linked, so the central sheet is starting to get quite slow to load and update. My question is this:

When doing cross workbook cell look ups, do arrays work more efficiently than individual cell references, or is there no noticeable difference in runtime?

My idea is to, in each project’s workbook, create an “export” tab that contains all the information that needs to be pulled out, and link the central sheet by looking at that array, rather than each individual cell.