Subsection 5.1
Why visual formatting is a trap
Reading
You inherited a roster that has been touched by five different organizers across two years. Each one had a system: yellow for housecalled, red for declined, blue for committee. None of those systems were documented. The fill colors do not survive a CSV export.
And underneath the colors, the actual data is fine. The problem is that the formatting is hiding the signal you actually need.
What inherited formatting actually breaks
- Pivot tables refuse to run. Merged cells in the header row will not let you pivot.
- Sorts produce wrong results. If color was the sort signal, sorting by name destroys it.
- Filtering misses rows. Rows hidden by inherited filters get skipped by formulas that reference visible rows.
- VLOOKUP fails silently. Conditional formatting can hide an extra hidden column you do not know exists.
The rule: strip everything to plain values before you write a single formula.
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