This is a perfect snapshot of the moment when a spreadsheet stops working for you and starts working against you. The user here, let's call them d4nfe, is doing something many of us have done: building a manual solution that grows until it becomes its own source of friction. Fifteen hundred rows, thirty fields per row, six fields that must be manually checked every four months, and a summary sheet that requires manual recalculation each time. That is not data management. That is maintenance work disguised as productivity.
What d4nfe is describing is a system that demands constant attention for tasks that should be automatic. Counting unique records, tallying duplicates, tracking which manufacturer appears how many times, or which location has the most entries, these are not insights. They are arithmetic. And every time a new row is added or an expiry date is updated, the summary sheet becomes a liability. A single forgotten update, one manual miscount, and the whole dashboard is wrong. The user knows this. That is why they are asking for formulas. But the real question is not which Excel function to use. The real question is why a spreadsheet is being asked to do work it was never designed to handle.
This is where an AI-native approach changes the equation. Instead of writing complex formulas to count duplicates or cross-reference manufacturers across sheets, the data itself can be treated as a living, queryable system. A tool that understands the structure of your data can automatically generate the summary you need, flag expired fields before you miss them, and handle the duplication logic without requiring you to build a custom formula tree. The user's request for "correct formulas" is a reasonable one, but it is also a signal that the underlying process is asking for a different kind of solution, one where the machine does the counting, and the human does the thinking.
The practical takeaway here is simple: if your spreadsheet requires manual tallying of 1500 rows, with another 100 arriving each month, you have already outgrown the tool. The answer is not a better formula. The answer is a smarter system. One that treats your data as a source of truth, not as a chore. And one that frees you to focus on what actually matters, like what those numbers mean, not how to calculate them.