This user's problem is a familiar kind of spreadsheet agony, and it reveals something important about the limits of traditional tools. When a table contains multiple price points and billback amounts for the same item, a simple lookup or INDEX/MATCH isn't enough. The user needs to calculate billbacks at the item level, not the table level, and each table can have dozens of unique values that must be matched against several IDs. The result is a combinatorial explosion: 40 items times 3 IDs equals 120 unique rows. The user is stuck, and the standard functions that usually rescue us from messy data simply cannot handle this logic.
This is the moment where a traditional spreadsheet stops being a solution and becomes part of the problem. The user tried lookup functions, but those tools were designed for one-to-one matches, not the one-to-many and many-to-many relationships that real-world data often demands. The spreadsheet itself is a monster, and the user is left trying to wrestle it into submission with formulas that were never built for this kind of work. The frustration is not a failure of skill; it is a failure of the tool.
What this user needs is not a better formula, but a fundamentally different approach to structuring data. AI-native spreadsheets can understand the relationship between a table, its items, and its price points as a logical model, not just a grid of cells. Instead of forcing the user to manually expand 40 items across 3 IDs, the system can dynamically generate the correct rows, apply the billback logic to each combination, and return the result in a clean, queryable format. The user's goal is clarity and accuracy, not more formula gymnastics.
The takeaway here is direct: if your data has layers of relationships and you are spending hours trying to force a lookup to work, the tool is holding you back. The expectation should be that the spreadsheet understands your data's structure, not the other way around. For this user, the path forward is not a better INDEX/MATCH hack. It is a tool that sees the item-level detail from the start.