The therapy unit at the hospital I work for had six treatment rooms.

Room 1, Room 2, Room 3, and so on, each split by the kind of therapy it handled. And each room kept its own document to record patients. The problem wasn’t that the documents existed. The problem was that no two of them looked alike.

Same patient. Same information. But every room ordered the columns differently and named things differently. One put the date in the first column. Another put it last. One wrote “treatment time.” The room next door wrote “minutes used.” On their own, each form worked fine. Looked at one at a time, there was nothing wrong.

The trouble showed up the moment anyone tried to combine them.

The work that never ended

Every so often, a request would come down from above: Can we see the overall numbers?

That was when the real work began. I would open all six documents side by side. I would line up columns that didn’t match, by eye, and move each value into one master table by hand. Days of this would get me a single sheet of statistics.

Then the next quarter, the same request came down again. And I started over. The table I’d built last time was useless if the format had shifted even slightly. So I rebuilt it from scratch. Every time.

I couldn’t stand it. This was obviously a job you do right once and never touch again. We just weren’t doing it right. So instead, we kept feeding people’s evenings into it.

The obvious answer

The fix was simple. Make all six rooms use one form.

Same columns. Same names. Same order, everywhere. Then there’s nothing to move when you combine them. The statistics become a matter of stacking, not translating. The answer was so obvious I wondered why nobody had done it years ago.

So I built a unified form in Excel and sent it around. And that’s where I learned Excel has walls of its own.

Where Excel broke down

Once a file gets passed around, you lose track of which copy is the real one.

The versions pile up. “Final.” “Actually final.” “Final, revised.” One person opens the file and everyone else is locked out until they close it. But I needed six rooms entering data at the same time. Excel was never built for that. I was trying to use a single-driver tool as a shared road.

This is the part I want you to take with you: the moment your problem is “many people, one shared thing, at the same time,” a file you email around is the wrong shape — no matter how clean the file is.

A tool that changed the shape of the problem

Around then I stumbled onto Google Sheets.

It looked almost exactly like Excel. But it had one difference that mattered. Several people could open the same screen and type into it at once, live. When one room entered a number, it appeared in that same cell on every other room’s screen. The whole ritual of passing files back and forth simply disappeared.

This was it. I started moving all our documents into Sheets, one by one.

But moving the data and making the data work turned out to be two different things. The second I tried to write formulas so the totals would calculate themselves, I got stuck. I’d trip on a function name. I’d miss a parenthesis and the whole thing would throw an error. And I had no one obvious to ask. The people around me didn’t know this either.

My first question to an AI

So one day, instead of opening a search engine like I always did, I opened something else.

What if I just asked an AI?

I typed my problem in plain language. Not as code, because I didn’t have any. Just: here’s what I have, here’s what I want it to do, what do I write in this cell? And it answered. Not a list of links to dig through. An actual answer, shaped to my actual sheet.

I don’t want to oversell that first moment. It wasn’t magic, and it wasn’t the end of my confusion. But something shifted. For the first time, the wall in front of me had a door in it, and I could keep asking until I got through.

That was the start.

What I’d tell you

Notice what hadn’t happened yet. I still couldn’t code. I didn’t suddenly understand software. All I had done was follow one annoying, repetitive problem far enough that it ran me out of the tools I knew.

That’s the pattern, I think. You don’t start by learning to build software. You start with a specific broken thing that keeps wasting your week, and you push on it until your old tools run out. Excel ran out. Search ran out. The AI was just the next door.

Next time, I’ll tell you what happened when I walked through it, and how those clumsy first questions slowly turned into something that actually ran.