Is a spreadsheet good enough for a Trading Journal?

A spreadsheet is good enough for a trading journal if you are willing to build and maintain the formulas, dashboards, and tagging systems yourself. The limitation is not capability — it is the friction and time cost of manually entering, formatting, and analyzing every trade without the automation a dedicated tool provides. Most traders start with spreadsheets and migrate to a purpose-built journal once the maintenance overhead starts eating into their trading time.