@royalpeasantry Hi Josh,
Have you seen the Builder’s Guide for Google Sheets?
It does address the INDIRECT usage. I don’t know if it answers your question and need. It is a good reference for Sheets developers if you haven’t seen it.
Thanks! That page looks like it is going to be very helpful.
It does explain why INDIRECT are used in some places (namely when looking up columns in other sheets), but in this case I was replacing INDIRECT(“G2:G”) with G2:G. I can’t see a reason that would be better? I suspect copy-pasta or some kind of reformatting leftovers shrug.
Unfortunately it also has a section that might immediately kill any simple plan to try and fix it.
Due to the duplicative use of the Account, Group and Hide header names, column lookups into the Accounts sheet are slightly different, starting in column
Ginstead ofA. Refer toBalances!X:Yfor an example.
If I understand correctly that paragraph encourages builders to look for columns in the Accounts page starting at column G. So… if I add a custom column to the page and then add a new solution that is reading from the accounts page… the new sheet will be searching from G since it wasn’t there when I added the new column.
The real fix is probably to break accounts up into two sheets… something like an Accounts sheet and an Account Properties sheet.
This… poses some problems from a backwards compatibility standpoint. I think it might be resolvable by moving columns A-D to the new Account Properties sheet and either leaving A-D blank or pointing them at the new sheet.