The "Excel Wizard" in your office is not the problem. The problem is the tool.
You built a reputation on pivot tables, and now you are being asked to solve a problem that spreadsheets were never designed to handle. A dashboard with two dropdown filters. Thirty-seven locations. Ten separate sheets covering contacts, contracts, insurance, equipment, and more. A single file where everyone can view and edit everything. And you know that as soon as someone touches a formula, the whole thing breaks.
You are not failing. You are hitting the hard ceiling of what manual spreadsheet architecture can do. The moment your dataset grows large, your filters multiply, and your collaborators start editing raw data, Excel stops being a solution and becomes a maintenance burden. Your instinct to consolidate onto one sheet was smart, but the mismatched headers stopped you, because the data is relational, not flat. Your advocacy for dedicated software was correct. The fact that your office wants "one place to view and edit" is a reasonable request. It is just not a request that a traditional spreadsheet can fulfill well.
What you need is a system that understands your data as a connected set of records, not as a collection of manually filtered sheets. An AI-native spreadsheet can ingest your ten sheets, recognize that location is a common key across all of them, and let you build a single dashboard where a location filter pulls contacts, contracts, insurance, and equipment into one view, without you writing a single formula. The filters become queries. The sheets become tables. The dashboard becomes a live window into your data, not a fragile construction of VLOOKUPs and pivot caches. When someone edits a contact record, the dashboard updates. No formulas to break. No wizard required.
Your next step is not to build a bigger Excel file. It is to explore a tool that treats your data as a database, not as a grid. Start with a free trial of a platform that supports multi-sheet relational queries and dynamic filtering. Import your ten sheets. Set up the location and category dropdowns. Let the system handle the joins. If it works, show your team a prototype. If it does not, you will have a concrete reason to make the case for software that matches the complexity of the problem. You already know the limits of the old way. The only question is whether you will discover what the new way makes possible.