Helper columns are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of clarity. The teacher from the Philippines who built an Excel system for their entire school, cutting weeks of end-of-year paperwork to a single hour, does not need to apologize for breaking logic into small, single-purpose columns. In fact, this approach is exactly what makes their system maintainable, teachable, and adaptable, especially when the tool must run on Excel 2019 and older for colleagues who may not share the builder's depth of knowledge.
We understand the self-doubt. When you've invested hours into reading, watching tutorials, and writing VBA, it's natural to measure your work against an abstract ideal of elegance. But elegance in spreadsheets is not the same as brevity. A formula that compresses ten operations into one cell may impress in a vacuum, but it becomes a black box the moment someone else, or future you, needs to debug it six months later. The teacher's own metaphor of organizing a room is telling: you put things where you can find them, not where they look most sophisticated. Helper columns are that organizational choice. They map each step of the logic visibly, so that when something breaks, you see exactly where, not just that something is wrong.
The real measure of a system is not how few columns it uses, but how well it serves its purpose. This teacher's system already transformed weeks into an hour. That is a concrete, verified outcome. If the next iteration introduces a few dozen helper columns to make the system work on Macs and older Excel versions, that is not playing it safe in a negative sense, it is designing for the actual users. Teachers do not need a single, dazzling formula that they cannot read or repair. They need something that works reliably and that they can adjust when their requirements shift from one school year to the next. Helper columns provide that resilience.
So here is our plain opinion: stop second-guessing. You built something that saves real time for real people, and you are now making it more accessible. That is the opposite of playing it safe, it is the most practical, human-centered engineering decision you can make. Keep your helper columns, label them clearly, and document why each one exists. Your system is not a contest of formula elegance. It is a tool for reducing paperwork so teachers can focus on students. That is the only benchmark that matters.