This is a story about a person doing brilliant work inside a tool that was never designed to scale the way they need it to. The problem isn't their skill, it's the architecture of the spreadsheet itself. And the solution isn't a clever formula hack; it's an entirely different approach to data.
The user here has built a working profit-and-loss template for venue events, linked to background rate sheets, and they've wired it all together with formulas they clearly understand. That's impressive. But then they hit the wall: they want to let colleagues duplicate the template freely, yet have the summary page automatically pick up each new tab. Anyone who has tried to solve this in Excel knows the dance. You can try INDIRECT, you can build a VBA macro, you can maintain a named range list. All of them break the moment someone renames a sheet, moves a tab, or copies the wrong cell. The workaround becomes its own job.
What this user really needs is not a better Excel trick. They need the data to be self-organizing. In an AI-native spreadsheet, each event isn't a separate tab that must be manually registered somewhere. It's a row. The summary is not a fragile collection of 3D references, it's a single query that updates the instant a new event is entered. The background rates become a lookup table, not a hidden sheet that has to be protected from accidental edits. The autonomy the user wants to give their team is real, not conditional on everyone following a strict naming convention.
This is what we mean when we talk about transforming how you work with data. The user's goal is correct: give people the freedom to create without breaking the system. The method they're using is the bottleneck. An AI-powered event summary doesn't ask you to manage tabs. It asks you to describe what you want to track, then it structures itself around your logic. The profit-and-loss for one event becomes a filter, not a new sheet. The summary becomes a live view, not a manual consolidation.
So here is the concrete point: if you are spending time maintaining a spreadsheet that is supposed to be maintaining itself, you are not the problem, your tool is. The next step is not to find a better formula. It is to stop treating your spreadsheet like a database and start using one that speaks your language.