Your comment about FOSS is spot on. While I'm very aware that Google Sheets is not OSS, it felt much more amenable to me than Excel (and I'm sure Excel's online free version isn't particularly fantastic anyway, though it may be better than Sheets from what people are saying here).

> How exactly do you program without knowing the shape of your data in advance? You need to know your database columns, or your JSON schema, etc.

This was a bit overloaded in my opinion, as in spreadsheets world, "shape" includes the number of rows, hence my comments. I know that the column layout needs to be known.

> Were you using dynamic array formulae

I looked into it, but couldn't figure out how to handle them without introducing a massive amount of formula duplication. The best I could figure out how to do was to do a single large FILTER (which is dynamic array) and doing a fill down on my other transformation formulas from there. I blacked out the rows past the end of the FILTER using conditional formatting rules (which felt very stupid to do, but I couldn't find anything better).

> The skill ceiling is very high

I don't doubt you, but if you can't discover the functionality, it might as well not exist. Admittedly I was clearly using the inferior tool, but in my searching for solutions I much more readily found Google's documentation over Excel's.

I also realize I'm not in the position of being forced into a corner; as most of us on this forum could, I just wave my magic wand and write the software to solve my problems. I imagine those who don't have that ability available to them will do "crazier and crazier" things to figure out how to accomplish their work in Excel, and therefore will learn much better ways than I have in my little experience with it.

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I was building a tool to track the completion of finding parts for a given Lego set. You enter the set ID, it pulls the parts list for that set (Rebrickable nicely offers their database as a set of CSVs https://rebrickable.com/downloads/) and formats it nicely for consumption.