We have a straightforward opinion on this: the problem isn't that you can't build a container tracker in Excel. The problem is that you're trying to build a container tracker in Excel. The user who posted this is doing something many logistics professionals have done, they've made a working forecasting model with stock levels, felt proud of that progress, and then hit a wall when the task shifted to tracking physical assets through a lifecycle. That wall is not a personal limitation. It is a tool limitation.
Spreadsheets are exceptional at static calculations and linear projections. They are terrible at tracking things that change state, location, and ownership over time. A container that goes from empty to full, moves through multiple sites, gets emptied, and returns to empty is not a row of data. It is a series of events connected to a single object. Excel forces you to flatten that sequence into columns and hope your formula copying doesn't break. The user already admitted they aren't an Excel guru and that they rely on copying formulas week by week. That approach works for a forecast with a fixed horizon. It will fail for a container loop that never ends.
The request to their workplace for a software solution was shut down. That is a common experience, and it is frustrating. But the response should not be to double down on a broken spreadsheet. It should be to ask a different question: what does a tool need to do to make this easy? The answer is that it needs to understand containers as entities with histories, not as rows in a table. It needs to let you say "this container is now at Site B and is full" without writing a formula. It needs to remember the entire journey so you can see patterns rather than reconstruct them.
We think the real opportunity here is not to build a better spreadsheet. It is to explore a tool that treats container tracking as a native function, not a workaround. AI-native spreadsheets can learn the structure of your data and surface the lifecycle automatically. They can ask you what you mean by "empty to full" and then build the tracking logic for you. That is not a future promise. It is a present capability. The user's struggle is exactly the kind of use case that makes traditional spreadsheets feel outdated, not because the user lacks skill, but because the tool was never designed for this job. Stop trying to force a square peg into a round hole. Look for a solution that meets your process where it actually lives.