Add to cell value - Overcomplicating it?

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Short answer: yes.

Since I’m the one who hinted at the idea of using lists vs separate rows in another recent topic, I think I should chime in here too.

Here’s what I’m thinking. Using lists in cells are a viable design choice if:

  1. You don’t need to calculate much out of them. E.g., in my timer example, it’s just sum minus sum. When you find yourself using FormulaMaps over those a lot, this is a bad sign.
  2. You don’t need to edit the data there
  3. You already have table structure that you don’t want to refactor
  4. You absolutely must conserve row count (although it’s just postponing the moment when you’ve got to upgrade to the Pro tier — at which point you must think whether saving $10/mo is worth all that trouble)

Otherwise I’d say go with separate rows. Especially in your case when you want to separately calculate added in selected period, today etc.

Also, IMO, bad idea to store updates like that, in formatted fashion, and then parsing them to extract the date and the value separately. At least store those as two separate lists: of dates and of numbers, in two separate columns. You can always iterate and match with Nth()

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