The Reddit user who posted this question did something rare: they described a real, messy data problem, worked through it publicly, and then shared the exact solution that worked. That solution, a single line of Power Query code that strips everything *except* text inside square brackets, is worth paying attention to, not because it is clever (though it is), but because it reveals how much friction still exists in tools that millions of people use every day.
Think about what this user had to do. They had hundreds of thousands of rows, two columns of text, and brackets scattered throughout. Every existing answer they found gave them the *inverse* of what they needed. They had to search, test, fail, adapt, and finally piece together a formula that combined Text.Split, List.Transform, Text.Contains, and Text.BeforeDelimiter. That is not a workflow. It is a puzzle. And the fact that this puzzle required a public forum and a community reply to solve tells us something about the gap between what spreadsheet tools offer and what people actually need.
What this user needed was not more functions. They needed an AI that understands intent. They wanted to say: *keep only the bracketed parts*, and have the tool do it. Instead, they had to learn Power Query, understand list transformations, and debug a nested formula. The solution works. But the process should not have been necessary. This is where AI-native spreadsheets change the equation. When a tool can parse a natural-language request like "extract everything inside square brackets and remove the rest," it collapses that entire discovery process into one step. The user gets the result, not the headache.
The practical takeaway is simple. If you are managing large datasets and find yourself writing multi-step formulas to do what feels like a straightforward task, you are not the problem. The tool is. AI can handle pattern recognition and text extraction without forcing you to become a formula expert. The user in this story found a workaround, and that is commendable. But the better path is a tool that understands what you mean and acts on it. That is the direction data management is heading, and it is one worth exploring.