The real issue here isn't curly braces, it's that Google Sheets and Excel speak different dialects of the same language, and users are left translating by hand. This user's frustration is entirely reasonable. They receive data from Google Sheets, download it for Excel, and every formula arrives wrapped in curly braces that Excel treats as foreign syntax. The braces are Google Sheets' way of denoting array formulas, but Excel interprets them as literal characters, producing the #NAME? error. The fix is simple: remove the braces. But doing that for hundreds of cells, one at a time, is not a workflow, it's a punishment.
What makes this problem particularly telling is that the formulas themselves are correct. The XLOOKUP inside the braces works perfectly once the braces are stripped. The user is not making an error; they are being penalized for using two tools that were never designed to cooperate cleanly. This is the hidden cost of relying on legacy spreadsheet ecosystems. Users spend their time not analyzing data, but cleaning up compatibility artifacts. That is not productivity. That is overhead disguised as routine.
The obvious workaround, find-and-replace the opening and closing braces across the sheet, can work, but it requires care. A simple Ctrl+H to replace "{=" with "=" and "}" with nothing will clear the braces from every formula at once. But this only works if the braces are the sole issue and no formulas contain nested arrays or other Excel-incompatible structures. The deeper lesson is that users should not have to become amateur data engineers just to move a spreadsheet from one application to another. The tools should handle this translation, or at least offer a clear export option that strips array markers.
Our position is plain: the future of data work should not require users to manually patch formatting quirks between tools. If you are regularly exporting from Google Sheets to Excel, you are working around a gap that should not exist. It is time to explore solutions that treat your data as a single, coherent asset, not a file format negotiation. The curly brace problem is a symptom of a larger truth: legacy spreadsheets were built for isolation, not integration. The next generation of tools should let you move between environments without breaking your work. Until then, learn the find-and-replace trick, and ask yourself why you are doing the machine's job.