This user built a Rube Goldberg machine out of Excel features, and it breaks every day because the tools were never designed to hold that much weight. The problem isn't the user. The problem is the tool.
Power Query, macros, data validation, conditional formatting across entire columns, manual row deletion, and a daily copy-and-reset ritual: that is not a workflow. That is a maintenance burden disguised as a spreadsheet. Every remap, every deleted row, every range shift is a stress fracture in a system that expects you to manage its limitations instead of the other way around. The user asks whether building everything on a worksheet instead of a table would be more stable. That question itself reveals the trap. You should not be optimizing which fragile container to pour your data into. You should be asking why your data needs to be poured at all.
The core insight here is that the user has built a process that treats the spreadsheet as both the engine and the chassis. It handles ingestion, transformation, formatting, manual review, and archival. Those are distinct jobs. When you force one tool to do all of them, you inherit the failure modes of every single layer. The conditional formatting breaks because table row deletion rewrites the applied-to range. The data validation breaks because it was never designed for daily structural changes. The macro breaks because of a drive remap that should have been invisible. None of this is the user's fault. It is the natural consequence of asking a legacy tool to perform tasks it was never architected to handle.
What this user needs is not a better Excel formula or a different range reference. They need a system where the data moves through defined stages without manual intervention. An AI-native spreadsheet would understand that the daily CSV is a source, not a workspace. It would handle the refresh, the filtering, the grouping, and the color coding as a single automated pipeline. The conditional formatting would not break because it would not be applied to a range that changes shape every day. The macro would not mysteriously stop working because there would be no macro. The user would spend their time reviewing the output, not repairing the machine that produces it.
Stop rebuilding your spreadsheets. Start asking for tools that respect your time.