What spreadsheets do well
Spreadsheets are flexible. You can customize columns, run your own formulas, and export anywhere. For a small number of sessions per month, a simple sheet can be enough.
Where friction shows up
As volume grows, maintenance costs rise: broken formulas, inconsistent date formats, and charts that need rebuilding. Mobile entry is often clunky. Many players stop updating — and then the history stops being trustworthy.
What a tracker optimizes for
A poker-focused tool is built to add a session quickly (including location type: home, casino, or online), compute profit and hourly rate, and show trends without you wiring pivot tables. That is the product tradeoff: less customization, faster routine use.
Choosing for you
If you enjoy building your own system, a sheet may fit. If you want the logbook to stay current with minimal overhead, software aligned to poker workflows usually wins — which is why free web trackers exist alongside Excel.