We have a straightforward opinion here: if you need to delete rows based on a partial text match, you should not have to hunt down a macro or decipher someone else's code to make it work. The user who posted this, let's call them Knight7_78, did the hard part. They found a macro that deletes rows on an exact match. That is a real win for anyone who has ever stared at a blank VBA editor wondering where to start. But the problem is that the macro treats data as all-or-nothing. It sees "Dup_this" and says, "That is not 'Dup_', no deletion." That is not how people actually work with messy, real-world data. They do not have the luxury of perfectly clean cells. They have prefixes, suffixes, stray characters, and inconsistent formatting. The tool should meet them where they are, not the other way around.
What this means in practical terms is that Knight7_78 is stuck between two bad options. They can manually scan thousands of rows, looking for every cell that starts with "Dup_" and deleting each one by hand. That is tedious, error-prone, and a complete waste of time. Or they can try to modify the macro themselves, which means learning about wildcards, the InStr function, or the Like operator, none of which is obvious to someone who just wants to clean up a spreadsheet. The community might offer a fix, and that is valuable, but it still puts the burden on the user to become a part-time programmer. The real issue is that a fundamental data-cleaning task, delete rows where a cell *contains* a specific string, is not a built-in, one-click action in the tool most people reach for first.
This is where the conversation shifts from a problem to an opportunity. The fact that a user has to copy a macro from the internet and then ask for help to adjust it tells us that the current generation of spreadsheets is not designed for the way people actually work. They are designed for exact matches and rigid structures. But data is fluid. It has variations. It has patterns, not perfect copies. An AI-native approach would recognize that "delete rows containing 'Dup_'" is a natural, human request. It would let you type that instruction in plain language, or highlight a pattern and say "delete everything like this." No macro. No debugging. No feeling like you need a computer science degree to get your work done. The goal should be to make the tool adapt to the user, not the other way around. That is the shift we think matters most: from exact-match logic to intent-based action.