I've used both VBA functions as well as the new LAMBDA() function, and they have their place. But there are legitimate reasons I don't want "magic" cells in my

I've used both VBA functions as well as the new LAMBDA() function, and they have their place. But there are legitimate reasons I don't want "magic" cells in my worksheet that exist only to be referred to by other cells. That kind of indirection comes with its own headaches. I try to make each cell useful for someone looking at that cell. Sometimes it makes sense to show the user the intermediate calculations. That's kind of the fundamental reason for spreadsheets—the paper kind!—in the first place. But I don't think it's right to spread a specific calculation out over many cells solely to avoid a complex function. Keeping it in the single cell—and using line breaks and indentation to make it more readable—is easier for me to maintain later, rather than bouncing around different locations in the sheet trying to reason about a given formula. Here's a real example where I'm listing the unique items from a data table that meet user-supplied threshold criteria: =UNIQUE( FILTER( data[Front Page Formatted], (data[Completed Month] = L$27) * (data[Expedite Rate in Month] >= cutoff_rate) * (data[Tickets in Month] >= cutoff_volume), "None" ) ) Those three filter criteria are booleans that are multiplied together. (Huh, should I have used AND() instead?) If all three are true, then the resulting list is UNIQUE'd and shown on the report page.