Originally, Excel was not designed to be a real database. Its early database functions were limited in quantity and in quality. And because every record in an Excel database is visible on the screen ...

Functions like FILTER, SORTBY, UNIQUE, XLOOKUP, and VSTACK transform static grids into real-time data systems.

Standard Excel lookups are perfectionists that fail on typos or extra spaces. While you could hack a solution using nested XLOOKUP, TRIM, and LOWER functions, it's brittle and hard to maintain. Power ...