The moment you build a table template with formulas and conditional formatting, only to watch it paste as plain values, you are not encountering a glitch. You are hitting a hard ceiling in how traditional spreadsheets think about data. The photographer's booking sheet described recently, painstakingly built, then broken by a simple copy-paste, is not a story about user error. It is a story about tools that treat formulas as fragile, location-dependent objects instead of reusable logic.
This is a structural problem, not a fixable one. Most spreadsheet engines treat a formula as a reference to a specific cell address. When you copy that formula across sheets, it either breaks or silently recalculates against the wrong context. The intern who lost the template's conditional formatting was experiencing the same fundamental limitation that Why copying formulas between sheets can change your results examines: the tool assumes cells are anchored in physical space, not in logical purpose. That assumption worked for single-sheet accounting ledgers. It does not work for anyone managing multiple months of photography bookings, project trackers, or any system where structure should travel with the data.
The practical consequence is wasted time re-creating logic. Every month, every new sheet, every duplicate table becomes a manual transcription exercise. What should be a fifteen-second operation turns into a half-hour debugging session, and the fix does not scale. You cannot train an entire team to dance around relative references and invisible named ranges. The better path is a tool that treats the table, formulas, formatting, and all, as a single portable object. When you copy a table, the logic should copy with it, adapting to the new location without requiring you to audit each cell.
Our earlier piece on Row insertion no longer breaks your spreadsheet formulas pointed in this direction: spreadsheets that understand structure, not just coordinates, let you move rows without collateral damage. The booking template problem is the same principle applied to cross-sheet duplication. A system that knows a formula belongs to a column, not a coordinate, can replicate that column anywhere without breaking. That is not a feature request. It is the minimum viable behavior for anyone who treats spreadsheets as applications, not scratchpads.
The specific takeaway is this: if your workflow requires copying the same table structure across multiple sheets, and you are spending minutes re-applying formulas and formatting each time, the tool is failing you. Demand a spreadsheet that treats your template as a repeatable object, not a fragile snapshot. Until that becomes standard, every month will cost you another round of paste-value grief.