This story is a perfect illustration of why traditional tools are holding you back. The user, Taxman1913, built a clever workaround for a real problem, but the process itself reveals a deeper inefficiency that too many of us accept as normal. He needed data on full moons and solar eclipses from 1948 to today. He found it online, used Power Query to pull it into Excel, and ended up with 79 separate queries because each year lived on a different web page. After merging them into one table, he hard-copied the results, deleted every query, and left behind a static snapshot that looks like he typed a thousand cells by hand. He did this to avoid the queries re-running each time the file opens and to protect against a broken URL. He plans to repeat the same manual process every year. He is treating a spreadsheet like a finished document when it should be a living system.
The problem here is not the user's technical skill. He figured out how to merge 79 queries, which is no small feat. The problem is that the tool itself forced him to choose between automation and stability. Power Query is powerful, but it ties your data to external sources that can change or break. Once he pasted the values, the data became inert. He lost the connection to the source, lost the ability to refresh, and lost the logic of how the data was built. That means next year, when he adds 2027's data, he cannot simply hit a refresh button. He must rediscover the websites, rebuild the queries, paste the values, and delete the logic again. Every year, he pays the same setup cost because the tool cannot separate the process of getting data from the process of keeping it current. That is not a user error. That is a design limitation.
What this reveals is a fundamental gap in how most spreadsheet tools handle data that does not change. Historical data on full moons is static. The moon will not produce a new 1948 cycle next year. Yet the tool treats every data source as a live feed that must be rebuilt on open. The user's instinct to delete the queries was rational, but it also erased the audit trail. Anyone who opens that file later, including the user himself, will have no idea where the data came from or how it was transformed. The file becomes a black box. A smarter spreadsheet would let you import data, lock it as static, and still retain the query logic as a document of your work. It would let you append new years without redoing the old ones. It would treat historical data as a completed chapter, not a recurring chore.
The takeaway for our readers is straightforward. If you find yourself building 79 queries to get data that will never change, and then deleting them so your file does not break, the tool is working against you. You are spending time on maintenance that should be spent on analysis. The goal is not to become a Power Query expert who knows every workaround. The goal is to use a tool that understands the difference between live data and archival data, and that lets you keep the story of your work without forcing you to choose between automation and reliability. Taxman1913's method works, but it works despite the tool, not because of it. That is the signal that it is time for something smarter.