The user who posted this question is doing something that thousands of spreadsheet users do every week: spending hours of their life on repetitive manual work that should be handled by their tools. They have a main report with eight tabs, each containing data for a different product. Up to 100 salespeople appear across those tabs in varying combinations. The task is to create individual reports for each person, with only the tabs where that person's data appears. That means Salesperson 1 might need three tabs, while Salesperson 2 needs seven. Doing this by hand for even a dozen people is tedious. For a full team, it is unsustainable.
The honest answer to whether this can be done without a macro is: technically yes, but practically no. You could filter each tab manually, copy each salesperson's rows into a new workbook, and repeat that process for every person and every tab they appear on. That is exactly what the user is trying to escape. A macro is the right solution here, but the user's hesitation is understandable. Macros have a reputation for being finicky and technical, something that requires learning VBA or hunting down unreliable code snippets online. The real problem is not that macros are hard. It is that the tools we have been using were not designed to make this kind of task simple.
This is where an AI-native approach changes the equation. Instead of asking the user to learn a scripting language or record a fragile macro, we can let them describe the problem in plain language: "Split this report into individual files by salesperson name, keeping only the tabs where each person has data." The tool understands the structure, executes the logic, and produces the correct output. The user does not need to know whether the underlying process is a macro, a script, or something else entirely. They just need the result. That is the shift that matters here. The focus moves from "how do I make this work" to "what do I want to accomplish."
For this user and anyone facing similar report-splitting tasks, the path forward is clear. Stop treating repetitive data work as an unavoidable part of the job. Start looking for tools that understand your intent and handle the mechanics for you. Your sanity is worth preserving, and the technology to do so already exists. The question is no longer whether you can automate this process. It is whether your current toolset is letting you down.