Is a Spreadsheet Good Enough for a Trading Journal?
Yes — if you're willing to do all the work yourself. A spreadsheet can do everything a dedicated journal does, as long as you build the formulas, design the dashboards, and tag every trade by hand.
The problem is friction. Every trade means manual entry. Every new setup means a new column. Every analysis means rebuilding the pivot table from scratch.
Most traders start in Excel and quit by week three, when the maintenance starts eating into actual screen time.