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I can’t take credit for this one, that goes to my brother:

He once tried to smoosh a house fly with a literal ball peen hammer. Suffice to say, the fly dodged with ease, the glass window it was sitting on not so much.

Second tangentially off topic reply by me, but hey, it's chat.

Something I encounter more often is rather the opposite. When people come to you with problems, (especially technology related, but it fits all types) it's often "what's the solution to this weird specific thing?" and that weird specific thing turns out to be a result of them being part way through solving a problem their own weird way, because they neglected to consider the hammer situation.

In your case I'd be like if you asked me for skateboard grip tape to attach to the cap because it's too hard to pull off.

A good technique is to do what you did, recognize something might be wrong here, and try re-understand the original problem, feel good about recognizing it, not foolish for misunderstanding at first.

I worry that I do this in my Excel sheets.

I've figured out a set of formulas to filter sheets by specific content, identifying the rows using IFs, then using INDIRECTs to pull the values. I should probably just be using Excel's integrated filtering tool, but I haven't bothered figuring out if you can do complex filters with formulas, and with how easy it is to maintain going forward.

So I just keep hammering away, cluttering my spreadsheets with lots of "helper" columns to slowly filter down my results one layer at a time.

Or, really, I should probably be using databases for most of these things.