This is a problem that should have a straightforward solution, and it's frustrating that it doesn't. You've built a scheduling system that tracks jobs across three sites, each with its own sheet. Now you need a fourth sheet that pulls all rows for a single employee into one view, sorted by due date. You've tried FILTER functions and table-to-range conversions, but you keep hitting a wall: you can filter, or you can auto-populate, but you can't do both at the same time. That's not a failure of your logic. It's a limitation of the tool you're using.
Traditional spreadsheets were designed for static data and manual updates. They weren't built for real-time consolidation across multiple sources with dynamic filtering. Every workaround you've attempted, FILTER, named ranges, converting tables to ranges, is a patch on a system that wasn't meant to do what you need. The fact that you have to choose between auto-population and sortability isn't a puzzle to solve; it's a signal that the tool itself is the bottleneck. Your workflow is asking for a unified, live view of distributed data. That's a fundamental feature of AI-native spreadsheets, not an afterthought.
What you're describing is exactly the kind of task that points toward a better approach. You have structured data across multiple sheets, a clear filter condition (a single employee), and a sorting requirement (due date). An AI-native spreadsheet can ingest those three sheets as a single logical dataset, apply the filter automatically, and update the fourth view in real time without breaking the sort. You wouldn't have to choose between functions. You wouldn't have to maintain a fragile formula chain. The consolidation would happen at the data layer, not in a formula cell that can break the moment you sort it.
The practical takeaway here is straightforward. Your current setup is costing you time and cognitive overhead every time you need to prioritize an employee's workload. That's not a minor inconvenience, it's a recurring drain on your productivity. Instead of layering more workarounds onto a tool that wasn't designed for this, consider a spreadsheet that treats your three site sheets as one dataset and lets you query it directly. You've already done the hard part: you've structured the data, defined the filter, and identified the sort. The next step is using a tool that respects that work instead of fighting it.