Here's a problem that has nothing to do with your ability, the quality of the video tutorial, or even the person who wrote the instructions. It's the tool itself. Excel was never designed to handle the repetitive, multi-step data transformation you're describing. It was built for static tables and manual entry, not for reliably splitting a single dataset across four sheets while keeping the original intact. When you follow a process to the letter and still get missing data, corrupted tables, and angry calls from downstream colleagues, the common denominator isn't you, it's the technology you're being asked to trust.
This isn't a training gap. Your supervisor admitted she's also untrained on the process, which means the organization has built a workflow around a tool that requires institutional guesswork. Every time you run the steps, you're essentially performing a manual ritual that Excel will interpret slightly differently depending on formatting quirks, hidden rows, or stray characters. That's not an intricate process. That's fragility dressed up as complexity. The real cost isn't just your frustration, it's the hours spent debugging, the missed deadlines, and the erosion of confidence that happens when you can't trust your own output.
What you need is a system that understands the intent behind the task, not one that forces you to memorize a fragile sequence of clicks. AI-native spreadsheets can ingest your raw corporate file, apply the transformation rules you've been following, and split the data into those four sheets automatically, while flagging anomalies like missing data before they reach the next person. The video and written instructions become obsolete because the logic is embedded in the tool itself. You stop playing whack-a-mole and start reviewing results.
The next time corporate sends that file, you should be able to drop it in, confirm the output, and move on. That's not a distant vision. It's a practical shift from wrestling instructions to letting the software handle the heavy lifting. Your job was never to be a human macro. It was to ensure the data is accurate and usable. Let the tool take the steps, and take the angry calls off your list.