Here is the issue: an employee attendance system that is functionally unreadable. The user, u/CrazyMeansCreative, has built a detailed setup, color-coded tabs per employee, red and green cells for attendance, a separate master list, but the entire thing collapses under its own weight the moment a manager needs a simple answer. They want to know which trainings an employee missed. That question should take seconds to answer. Instead, they are debugging nested IF formulas across half a dozen sheets.
This is a common trap, and we see it often. The problem is not a lack of effort. The problem is that the system was designed for data entry, not for insight. Color coding makes a spreadsheet look polished, but it does nothing for analysis. A human eye scanning red versus green is not a reliable reporting method, especially across dozens of employees and multiple training sessions. The user correctly guessed they needed a formula, but the real issue is structural. They are trying to force a lookup into a sheet that was never built to be looked up.
What this user actually needs is a single, flat table. A single row per employee per training session. The columns would be Employee Name, Training Name, and Attendance Status. No separate tabs. No color codes. Just data. Once that structure exists, a simple FILTER function becomes available: pull all rows where Employee equals the selected name and Attendance equals "No." The answer is instant, it is auditable, and it scales. Adding a new employee or a new training is just another row, not another tab.
We are not saying spreadsheets are bad. They are powerful when designed with the question in mind, not the visual layout. A red-and-green grid feels productive, but it is a confidence trick. The next time you find yourself building a color-coded dashboard for data you need to search through, stop. Ask yourself what question you are actually trying to answer. Then build the table that answers it, and let the formatting be decoration, not the logic.