The problem in this Reddit post is not about Power Query syntax. It is about a person being asked to solve an organizational problem with a tool that was never designed for it. The request to split employee data into separate VP sheets by checking six supervisor-level columns is a classic sign that the reporting structure has outgrown the spreadsheet. We see this story play out every day in companies where data lives in flat files, and the people managing it are left to build fragile workarounds.
What this user is describing is a data management pattern that breaks under its own weight. A lookup table for VP names is a reasonable patch, but it reveals a deeper structural issue. When your HR data requires you to search six columns just to find who someone reports to, the data model is not serving you. The real solution is not a clever Power Query function that filters rows by name. It is a data model that understands hierarchy as a native concept, not a text string buried in a column. An AI-native spreadsheet does not ask you to write nested lookups. It asks you what you need to see, then structures the data accordingly.
The user is not a beginner. They are a competent professional who has been handed a system that forces them to become a detective for every report. That is not their fault, and it is not a skill gap. It is a tool gap. The moment you find yourself building a manual lookup table to keep your reports from breaking when a VP changes, you have already lost the productivity game. The tool should absorb that change automatically. It should recognize that a leadership update in one place propagates through every report, every sheet, every dashboard without the user touching a single query.
Our opinion is plain: stop treating your spreadsheet like a database. If you need to sort data by leadership structure, do not write six conditional columns. Demand a tool that understands hierarchy. The user in this post deserves a solution where they type "show me everyone under VP Smith" and get a clean report, not a weekend of debugging Power Query. That is the future of data work, and it is already possible.