Identify every employee linked to a non-compliant manager instantly.

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3 min readMicrosoft Excel | Help & Support with your Formula, Macro, and VBA problems | A Reddit Community

This question from a Reddit user cuts straight to a pain point that anyone managing compliance data knows well: the gap between individual status and organizational risk. The dataset is simple, five employees, three managers, three statuses, but the request reveals a deeper need. The user wants to surface every employee under a non-compliant manager, even when those employees are themselves compliant or in process. That is not a minor filtering trick. It is a fundamental shift in how we think about accountability. A single non-compliant manager creates a cascade of exposure that a flat list of individual statuses will never show you.

What makes this request practical is its specificity. The user already knows the output they need: a new filterable table that groups employees by manager risk, not just individual compliance. That is the right instinct. A static snapshot of who is compliant and who is not tells you what happened yesterday. A dynamic view that flags every person linked to a non-compliant manager tells you where the next problem could come from. In this case, Carl is not non-compliant, but he reports to Sarah, who is. If the goal is to proactively manage risk, Carl matters as much as Lucy does. The user sees that. The question is whether their tool can keep up.

The mention of PowerQuery is telling. It suggests the user is willing to build a solution themselves, but they are looking for a path that does not require a data engineering team. That is exactly the kind of friction that AI-native tools are designed to remove. A query that scans for manager status, then expands to include all direct reports, is a straightforward logic problem. In a traditional spreadsheet, it requires multiple steps and manual validation. In a tool designed to think alongside you, it should be a single request. The user should not have to ask for help on a forum to get a table that answers a question this clear.

The practical takeaway here is simple: your compliance view is only as good as the relationships it captures. If you are still looking at individual rows and ignoring the manager link, you are missing the pattern. The user who posted this question already understands that. The next step is finding a tool that makes that connection feel natural, not like a workaround.

From Microsoft Excel | Help & Support with your Formula, Macro, and VBA problems | A Reddit Community

Above is an example of the dataset I'm working with. What I would like to do is pull back a list of all managers and all employees under any manager with a "non-compliant" status, even if those employees are not non-compliant.

With the example above, I would pull back Lucy and Carl for the manager Sarah since Lucy is non-compliant.

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