[angdis]

No, not actually.

I only used the word "trick" because you did. There are NO TRICKS in math. If a practitioner uses the word "trick" its because he's being facetious or joking. The algebraic manipulations which you find challenging are absolutely essential to master inside-out to be able to follow more advanced mathematical reasoning. You'll see these "tricks" again in a profoundly more generalized form if you study Algebra again (abstract algebra, that is).

There is utility in doing algebra on your computer when you're dealing with literally pages for one expression. That is done to save time and reduce the probability of errors-- and NOT because you "can't" otherwise do it. Even then, you'll need to manually sanity-check the work using skills you learned doing all those tedious problem sets.