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Spreadsheet vs app

Tracking concerts in a spreadsheet vs a concert diary app

If you have been keeping your gigs in Excel, Google Sheets or the Notes app, you are in good company. Here is what a spreadsheet does better, what it makes hard, and a free template if you want to keep using one.

What a spreadsheet does better

• It is yours. No account, no company that might change the rules, and the file opens in twenty years.
• Any column you want. Ticket cost, train home, the weather. An app only has the fields its makers thought of.
• Bulk edits. Fixing a venue name across forty rows is one find-and-replace.
• It works on a computer. KonzertCheck is phone only, so if you do your logging at a desk, that matters.

Where a spreadsheet runs out

• Photos and videos have nowhere to go. The clip of the encore stays buried in your camera roll. In KonzertCheck it sits on the review, up to three per show.
• Everything is typed by hand. Artist spellings drift ("The 1975", "1975"), and your counts drift with them. The app searches artists and venues, so the same band is always the same band.
• Setlists get copied over or skipped. The app pulls the night's setlist from setlist.fm and lets you mark the songs that mattered.
• Festivals become dozens of rows. In the app a festival is one entry, day by day, with a score for every act you saw.
• Stats need formulas. Shows per year, most-seen artist, favourite venue and how generous your ratings are come for free in the app's stats tab.
• It is a list for one. Nobody else opens your sheet. In KonzertCheck you tag who you went with, they add their own score for the same night, and your feed shows what your friends saw last weekend.
• It never reminds you. The app reminds you to review a show you marked yourself as going to, while you still remember the setlist.

Side by side

Free concert log template

Sticking with a spreadsheet? Start from ours. It has the columns we found worth keeping after designing KonzertCheck's review form, with one example row to delete. It opens in Excel, Google Sheets (File › Import) and Numbers.

Columns: Date · Artist · Support acts · Venue · City · Country · Tour or festival · Rating (0-10) · Top song · Top moment · Would see again · Went with · Ticket price · Setlist link · Notes

Three tips if you go the spreadsheet route: write dates as 2026-06-14 so they sort correctly, keep one row per artist rather than per night so festivals and support acts count, and pick one spelling per artist and stick to it.

Questions