I sadly had to go deep in excel for a year or so early in my career. This is a good overview. Only change I’d make would be to move Index to your third categor

I sadly had to go deep in excel for a year or so early in my career. This is a good overview. Only change I’d make would be to move Index to your third category alongside Vlookup, and add the Match function there as well, making sure to advise using exact match (match type 0, which isn’t the default). I ditched Vlookup for Index-Matching and was able to scale notebooks quite a bit further. I don’t know why this was, however. Pushing all the heavy data processing to the SQL database, by pre-computing every possible metric to be shown to users, made my spreadsheets super lightweight and responsive. Essentially only doing index-match lookups against a single (but big) data tab. The finance team loved it.