The real question for that Excel user isn't about nested JSON or VBA scripts. It's about whether the effort to reshape the data is worth the return. And for most civil engineers staring down a column of nested bidder records from the Alaska DOT, the honest answer is that the manual approach, splitting tables, writing macros, concatenating later, consumes time that could be spent actually analyzing the bids. That is the core friction, and it is exactly where AI-native spreadsheets change the calculus.
What the user describes is a classic data structure problem. The DOT API returns a list of projects, and within each project lives a list of bidders. In a traditional spreadsheet, that nested relationship collapses into a single column of unworkable records. The instinct to reach for VBA or a secondary table is understandable, it is what years of working within spreadsheet constraints have taught us to do. But the premise of that approach is that the tool cannot handle the data as it naturally exists. An AI-native spreadsheet flips that premise: it treats nested data as a first-class structure, not a formatting challenge. You do not need to flatten the hierarchy to analyze it; you can query across it, expand it, and reference it without breaking the original structure.
This matters in practical terms for anyone pulling public bid data. The Alaska DOT feed, like many state transportation databases, delivers information in a shape that reflects real-world relationships, one project, multiple bidders, not a tabular flatland. A tool that understands that shape lets you ask questions like "which bidders appeared on the most projects in the last two years" or "what is the average spread between the low and high bid for projects over $1 million" without first reshaping the data into a separate table. The effort shifts from data wrangling to data interrogation.
The user is right to question whether the VBA path is worth the effort. For a one-off analysis, it might be. But if this is a recurring workflow, and for anyone estimating bids on a regular basis, it likely is, then the tool itself should adapt to the data, not the other way around. The future of spreadsheet work is not better macros; it is spreadsheets that already understand the structure you are working with. That is the standard worth exploring.