It's 11pm on a Tuesday. The trip leaves Saturday. You're staring at a Google Sheet trying to figure out who said they'd bring the two-person tent. Was it in the comments? Did someone update the wrong row? Why are there three columns that all say "Gear"?
We've all been there.
Spreadsheets seem like the obvious choice for trip planning. They're free, everyone has access, and you can make them do almost anything if you're stubborn enough. The problem is that "almost anything" comes with a lot of asterisks.
The version control nightmare
Here's what happens. You create "Trip Gear List v1". Someone downloads it to add their stuff offline. Meanwhile, three people edit the original. Now there's "Trip Gear List v1" with unsaved changes, "Trip Gear List FINAL", and "Trip Gear List FINAL (2)" sitting in someone's downloads folder.
Which one is the real one? Nobody knows. You'll find out when you're at the trailhead and there are two camp stoves but no pot.
Mobile is painful
Try editing a spreadsheet on your phone while you're at the gear shop. The cells are tiny. You accidentally delete a formula. Autocorrect changes "bivvy" to "baby". You give up and text someone to add it for you.
That text gets buried under thirty messages about who's bringing snacks.
No notifications, no accountability
Someone changes the departure time from 6am to 7am. Do you get a ping? No. Do you find out? Maybe. Probably when you're waiting in the carpark at 6am wondering where everyone is.
Spreadsheets don't tell you when things change. You have to remember to check. And people don't.
The sharing permissions dance
You want everyone to see the sheet. But if you give them edit access, someone will accidentally delete the formula that calculates the food budget. If you don't give them edit access, they can't mark their gear as confirmed.
So you create a "suggestions only" mode, except now you have to manually approve every single change, and that one person who wants to add seventeen items submits them one at a time.
When formulas break
Your mate who's "good with spreadsheets" builds an elaborate system with VLOOKUP and conditional formatting. It works great. Then someone inserts a row in the wrong place and suddenly the meal plan thinks everyone is eating on day 7 and day 3 doesn't exist.
Nobody knows how to fix it. The spreadsheet stays broken. You wing it.
Shopping lists are a mess
Meal planning in a spreadsheet means manually counting how many tins of beans you need across all the meals. Someone changes "beans" to "baked beans" in one cell and now your aggregation doesn't work.
You end up with two tins instead of six. Dinner gets interesting.
RSVPs scattered everywhere
"Who's actually coming?" shouldn't require detective work. But with spreadsheets, the answer lives in a column that nobody updates, a WhatsApp thread from two weeks ago, and a vague memory of someone saying "yeah probably" at the pub.
The thing is, spreadsheets are great tools
For budgets, for tracking, for analysis - they're brilliant. But trip planning isn't a spreadsheet problem. It's a coordination problem.
You need something that knows a trip has participants, gear, meals, and costs. Something that sends notifications when things change. Something that works on your phone without wanting to throw it.
That's why we built AdventureForge. Not because spreadsheets are bad, but because trips deserve a tool that actually understands what a trip is.
Your meticulously crafted Google Sheet served you well. But you don't have to nurse it anymore.