If you are wrestling with INDEX, MATCH, and COUNTIF just to answer "how often do Character A and Character D appear together," you are not the problem. The spreadsheet is. That Reddit user's frustration, hopping between functions, staring at a grid of 32 columns, wanting to cross-reference one character row against 21 others, is not a niche hobbyist dilemma. It is the daily reality for anyone who has tried to make legacy spreadsheet tools do something they were never designed to handle: relational analysis at scale.
What this user is describing is a classic cross-occurrence count. In a traditional spreadsheet, solving it means writing a formula that checks every column, interprets "1" and "1*" as the same value, and then sums only the matches for a specific pair. That is doable, but it is brittle. One extra column, one renamed event, one change in how attendance is marked, and the whole structure breaks. The user already suspects they need to reformat their data. That is the tell. When a tool forces you to reshape your data before you can ask a simple question, the tool has failed, not you.
An AI-native spreadsheet would handle this differently. It would let you describe the relationship you want to count, "how many events include both A and D", and return the answer without nested functions or data scrubbing. The technology already exists to parse natural language queries and map them onto tabular data. The barrier is not the complexity of the question; it is the rigidity of the interface. This user is not asking for anything exotic. They want a two-way count across a grid. That should be a one-step operation, not a multi-hour debugging session.
The practical takeaway is this: if your workflow depends on chaining lookup functions to answer basic combinatorial questions, you are spending time on plumbing, not analysis. The future of data management is not about becoming a faster formula writer. It is about tools that understand your intent. Stop treating spreadsheet formulas as a badge of honor and start asking whether the tool is actually helping you think. The answer, in this case, is clear: it is not. You deserve better than a workaround.