This story is a perfect illustration of how small technical frictions can derail a whole workflow. The problem isn't that the data is wrong, it's that the tools don't speak the same language.
The user is doing everything right. They extract customer data from Power BI, paste it as plain text into LibreOffice, and filter for the correct date. Then they transfer that data to an online Excel spreadsheet for a colleague. And yet the colleague rejects the output because it lacks a "green dot", Excel's visual indicator that a number is stored as text. That green dot is a symptom of a deeper issue: the data's underlying format is incompatible. The colleague's Excel-native data is recognized by the application; the user's data, processed through LibreOffice and plain-text pasting, arrives as generic text strings, not as numbers or dates that Excel can deduplicate or format automatically.
This is not a user error. This is a toolchain failure. The company has not provided Excel, so the user is forced to use LibreOffice, which is perfectly capable for many tasks but introduces invisible format barriers when data must cross back into the Microsoft ecosystem. Every paste-special operation strips away metadata, number types, date serials, cell formatting, that Excel relies on to treat data as structured. The result looks identical to a human eye but is effectively a different file format to the software.
Our take is straightforward: this friction is unnecessary, and it is costing this user time and credibility every day. The solution is not to work harder within broken workflows. It is to adopt a tool that eliminates the format translation step entirely. An AI-native spreadsheet can read any exported data, Power BI, CSV, LibreOffice, and preserve its structure, including number and date types, without requiring manual paste-special workarounds. It can also filter and deduplicate natively, producing output that any downstream Excel user will recognize as correctly formatted.
The green dot should not be a point of conflict between colleagues. It should be invisible. The user's data is accurate and well-filtered; the only thing missing is a tool that respects that accuracy during transfer. If you are in a similar situation, working with one tool, submitting to another, and constantly fighting format mismatches, the real fix is not to master the quirks of paste-special. It is to find a spreadsheet that treats all incoming data as first-class citizens, regardless of its origin. Your workflow should serve your work, not the other way around.