You built something beautiful. Linked sheets, pivot tables, formulas that make other people say "wow, how did you do that?"

Then someone emails you an address change two weeks after your event. You update one sheet but forget the other four copies. Now Sarah from marketing is working off the wrong contact list and wondering why her emails bounced.

Meet Amber, operations manager at an event company. Here was the monthly nightmare.

• Copy contact data from last event's sheet
• Build a new workbook for the next event
• Field email updates and try to remember which sheets need fixing
• Watch someone accidentally clear a formula and break everything
• Spend Sunday afternoon hunting down the "real" version

Five versions of the same contact. Zero confidence in the data. The team asking "which spreadsheet is current?" every other day.

This is how it looks once we moved to Airtable:

• One contact database feeds every event
• Updates happen once and flow everywhere
• Custom views let each person see what they need
• Formulas live in the base structure, not fragile cells

Twelve hours of weekend cleanup became thirty minutes of Monday prep. Amber still uses all those Excel skills. Now she build systems instead of fixing broken links.

Amber now has a folder called "Excel Graveyard."

Takeaway
Your spreadsheet genius was never the problem. The tool just wasn't built for what you were asking it to do.

Still occasionally mourning a lost pivot table,
Jamie

P.S.
This is the kind of shift we build together inside the AI Operator Bootcamp. Slots are now open in our January cohort.