How do beginners automate repetitive Excel Reports without VBA?

I’m trying to better understand how spreadsheet beginners handle repetitive tasks like cleaning the same CSV every week, filtering rows, or renaming columns.

A lot of tutorials jump straight into scripts or VBA, which can feel overwhelming early on.

I’m experimenting with an approach where you describe cleanup steps in plain English to AI instead of writing formulas. Save workflow and reuse on any new dataset.

I’d really love beginner perspectives:

\- What spreadsheet tasks feel repetitive but hard to automate?

\- What’s the moment where things start feeling “too complex”?

\- Would a plain-English approach be helpful, or confusing?

I’m mainly here to learn how beginners think about these problems.