Home/Compare/GamesTally and spreadsheets
An honest comparison
Not on a competitor's platform. On Excel, or Google Sheets, with a WhatsApp group feeding it and one person typing. We ran events that way for years, so this page is written from the inside rather than from a sales deck.
Start here
We would rather say this at the top than bury it. If your events look like the list below, close this page and keep your sheet. You do not need to spend USD 4,000 to solve a problem you do not have.
A good facilitator with a laptop and a well-built sheet will handle all of that, and handle it well. Excel is a genuinely excellent tool. It is not the enemy here.
This is the point where the sheet stops being a tool and starts being a job that one person has to do instead of running the event.
The failure modes
Not theoretical. These are the five that cost us afternoons.
Scores are written on paper at the station, photographed into WhatsApp, then typed into the sheet by whoever is holding the laptop. Every result passes through one person, and that person cannot leave the table.
A scoring layer moves entry to the person who saw the result happen. That is the whole difference.
By the time the sheet is current, two more stations have finished. Putting it on a screen means rebuilding it in PowerPoint at lunch, so most agencies simply do not show live standings at all.
Teams ask where they are. The honest answer on a spreadsheet event is usually “about twenty minutes ago, you were third”.
You built the sheet for fifty teams. Forty-seven turn up. Now the formulas, the ranking columns and the tug of war bracket all need rebuilding, in a hotel lobby, before nine.
This is the single most common event-morning emergency, and it is entirely a spreadsheet problem.
Points are easy. A timed race that has to convert to points, a tug of war scored on finishing position, and a judged round with weighted criteria, all resolving to one table, is where the formulas start to sprawl.
It is doable. We did it for years. It is also where the errors live, and errors in a leaderboard are visible to the client.
Someone typed 175 instead of 157. It is found at the awards. On a sheet you fix the cell and hope, because there is no record of what changed or who changed it.
When a team asks why they dropped a place, “we corrected an entry error” needs to be provable.
Side by side
If you already have a scoring sheet you like, bring it to a demo. Yes, you can bring your Excel sheet. Years of accumulated rules are sitting in those formulas and most of them are there for a reason someone learned the hard way.
Questions
Bring it to the demo. It is the fastest way to show us how your event actually works, and it usually tells us more than a brief would.
What gets carried across is your scoring logic, not the file itself. The rules in those formulas are the valuable part.
There is no exact number, but the pressure usually shows somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five teams, and it comes from stations rather than teams.
Six stations and forty teams is 240 results moving through one person. That is the arithmetic that breaks the afternoon.
It can show a shared sheet on a screen, and for some events that is genuinely enough.
What it will not do is look like your client's event. A shared spreadsheet on a ballroom screen reads as a working document, because it is one.
The honest answer is that the scoring maths is not the hard part. Entry from the ground, live standings, brackets that regenerate and a branded screen are the hard parts.
If all you need is the maths, a spreadsheet already does the maths.
That is normal, and it is a reason the licence is one-off rather than per event. Use it on the twenty events that need it and keep the sheet for the two that do not.
Nothing about buying a scoring system obliges you to run everything through it.
No, and most of our own planning still happens in one. Run sheets, staffing, prize lists and budgets all live perfectly well in Excel.
What moves is the live scoring during the event, because that is the part where a spreadsheet needs a person.
Before you decide
We mean that. Most events do not need a scoring system, and an operator running two a year is better off with a sheet that works properly than with a licence they use twice. These are written out in full, with the templates free and no email form on any of them.
The formulas that do the work, four scoring methods in one table, and the six things that go wrong on event day anyway.
The leaderboard in Google Sheets
The better answer if more than one person is entering scores, which is the failure described further up this page.
Six games, four ways of scoring, one standing a room will accept. Including where the penalty goes.
Start here
Bring us your event. Your spreadsheet. Your score sheet. Your PowerPoint. Or just tell us what's driving you mad, we'll show you what GamesTally could turn it into.
Yes, you can bring your Excel sheet.