Spreadsheets have a dirty secret: they make you do the heavy lifting. The user who posted this question is living that reality, painstakingly stitching together data from multiple arrays into a single summary block. They managed to wrangle `=INDEX(ROWS(FILTER(...)))` for the first array, then hit a wall when the formula needed to scale across three sections. That wall is familiar to anyone who has tried to move beyond a single, tidy dataset. The instinct to automate is right, but the tooling keeps forcing manual, repetitive work. That is not a user failure; it is a design failure baked into the traditional spreadsheet model.
What this person needs is not a more clever nested formula. They need a system that understands the *shape* of their data, not just the individual cells. The fact that they have 51 pages in their actual workbook makes the problem even clearer. A formula that works for three arrays will likely break at 51, or become so convoluted that debugging it eats an entire afternoon. The real insight here is that the summary they are trying to build is not a calculation. It is a structural operation: "take these three blocks of related information and merge them into one coherent view." That is a job for a tool that treats data as a living, interconnected whole, not a static grid of coordinates.
The practical takeaway for anyone nodding along is this: stop optimizing your formulas for a problem that should not exist. If you are spending more time managing the mechanics of your spreadsheet than actually interpreting the results, you are using the wrong layer of abstraction. The user's question reveals a common trap, where the tool becomes the obstacle between an idea and its execution. They are not asking for a better way to type; they are asking for a better way to think about their data. That is a distinction that matters.
The solution is not to memorize more functions or stack more filters. It is to adopt a tool that recognizes patterns, infers relationships, and lets you ask for the summary you want, not the one you have to code line by line. For this user, and for anyone staring at a 51-page workbook, the next step is not another forum post. It is a shift in mindset: demand that your spreadsheet do the understanding, not just the storing. When that happens, the summary writes itself, and you get your time back. That is the transformation worth exploring.