I’m not a developer ...

Oh yes, you are!

It positively amazes me what people will do in Excel, or in SAS®, as though they were stubborn to use only those facilities.   (I’m not slamming anyone here, BTW.   Rather, my point is that ...)   The “discovery,” familiar to us all here nut nonetheless not common knowledge or practice, is that “a very small [Perl] script” can sometimes make all the difference.   (I have also looked at some of those improbable constructions and wondered, “how could you debug that?”   Once again not slamming anyone:   I quite-literally wonder how such a complex, inter-linked and non-sequential system as often exists in a massive spreadsheet can be effectively debugged ... when pre-processing data through preliminary scripts is an approach that to me is so much more clear, and clearly testable.)

Perl, in particular, is a pragmatic tool:   originally conceived as a solution to a problem by a language-designer who had one.