That's actually my default response when people intimate the work I do must be complex / I must be clever - it's really just hard graft. Sometimes you just have to be willing / stubborn enough to chip away at a problem that initially seems insurmountable. Sure, the more knowledge you accumulate, the faster you can figure out when to look, but often enough you just need to roll up your sleeves and bisect your search space.

I can imagine you get some pretty warty excel files. I mostly get PDF for my sins. I'm sure, like me, you've spent hours taking bits out of files until they work as expected and then figuring out what the difference is :-)