The workaround you built, SEQUENCE, UNIQUE, SUMIFS, and a manual total line, is exactly the kind of clever, hard-won solution that defines a capable spreadsheet user. But it's also a perfect illustration of why we believe the future of data work shouldn't require that level of gymnastics.
You have a straightforward need: a weekly report that shows every day of the week, including weekends with zero hours. Your data table only contains dates with hours, so a standard PIVOTBY skips the empty ones. That's not a failure of your logic; it's a limitation of the tool. You've already hacked around it with a formula that calculates the Monday of the current week, then arrays seven column headers, then fills in hours conditionally. It works. But it's brittle. Every time you add a new week, you have to trust that formula chain, and anyone inheriting your spreadsheet has to decode it.
What you're really asking, whether a single function can replace all that, is the right question. It points to a deeper shift. Legacy spreadsheets treat missing data as an absence to be ignored. An AI-native approach treats missing data as information: the weekend exists, your team didn't work it, and that's a valuable pattern to track. The tool should understand that a zero is not a gap; it's a deliberate entry.
Our opinion is plain: you should not have to build a custom scaffolding just to get a consistent seven-day week. The platform should let you express "pivot by employee and date, including all dates in the week range" as a single intent. That means the function itself should accept a start date and a step (daily, weekly) and automatically fill in empty intersections with zero or null, without requiring you to pre-generate headers or write conditional lookups.
This isn't about adding more features. It's about the tool understanding your context. You're not just aggregating data; you're producing a report that has a fixed structure, Monday through Sunday, regardless of what the raw table contains. That's a reporting design choice, not a data-shaping problem. The best solution is one where you declare the design choice once, and the system handles the rest.
For now, your SEQUENCE-based approach is a solid workaround, and it deserves respect. But we hope the next generation of spreadsheet tools makes it obsolete. When you can write `PIVOTBY(Employee, Date, Hours, SUM, , [WeekStart=Monday])` and get every day of the week, zeros and all, you'll know the tool has finally caught up to what you needed all along.