Sheets does three things Excel cannot, and they are exactly the three things that matter at a live event. The formula work is the same in both, and it is written out in full in the Excel guide, so this one covers the differences rather than repeating them. Several people can key scores at once without fighting over a file. Version history tells you who changed a number and what it was before. And a sheet can be published to a screen that refreshes itself.
If you are choosing between the two for an event, choose Sheets. This is not a close call.
Below: the formulas, the Google Forms trick that gets facilitators entering from their phones, and the point at which even this stops being enough.
The Structure Is The Same.
One tab where people type raw results. A separate tab that ranks and displays. Never both in one grid.
If you already read the Excel version, the reasoning is identical and so is the scoring maths, including the rank-to-points conversion for timed and quantity games. Everything in that article works in Sheets unchanged. What follows is only what Sheets does differently.
Our template opens in Sheets: File, Import, Upload. Two formulas want swapping once it's in, and both swaps make it simpler.
Use SORT And QUERY. They Actually Work Here.
In Excel I told you to avoid dynamic array functions, because they misbehave in files that get emailed around and opened in older versions. That warning does not apply in Sheets. There is one file and one version of it.
So the whole LARGE/INDEX/MATCH helper-column dance collapses to:
=SORT(A4:C23, 3, FALSE)Team in A, total in C, sorted descending by column 3. That's the entire leaderboard.
If you want more control, QUERY reads like a sentence:
=QUERY(A4:C23, "select A, C where C is not null order by C desc label C 'Points'", 0)Both update the instant a score changes. No fill-down, no dragging, and nothing to break when you add a team.
Positions still need RANK, and it still hands you 1, 2, 2, 4 on a tie. Read the tie-break section of the Excel guide before your event, not during it.
The Google Forms Trick.
This is the part worth the article.
Build a Google Form with three questions: which station, which team, what score. Send the link to your facilitators. They open it on their phones at the station, submit, and the response lands in a tab of your sheet automatically.
That gets you most of the way to results entered by the person who actually saw them, which is the single biggest source of error in event scoring. No radio, no group chat, no clipboard walked back to a laptop.
Form responses append as rows rather than sitting in a grid, so pull them into your table with SUMIFS:
=SUMIFS('Form responses 1'!$D:$D, 'Form responses 1'!$C:$C, $A4, 'Form responses 1'!$B:$B, B$3)Team name in column A of your grid, game name in row 3, and the form writing team, station and score into columns C, B and D of the responses tab. Adjust the letters to match your form.
Two things to set up before the day. Turn on Edit after submit so a facilitator can fix their own typo rather than submitting twice. And decide what happens if someone submits the same score twice anyway, because SUMIFS will cheerfully add both. MAXIFS instead of SUMIFS takes the highest rather than the sum, which is usually the safer default for a single-score-per-game event.
Putting It On A Screen.
File, Share, Publish to web. Choose the leaderboard tab, or a named range if you want to hide the working. You get a link that shows the table without the toolbars, the tabs or anyone's cursor.
Open that on the display laptop and it refreshes on its own.
Be realistic about "live". A published sheet updates on a timer, not instantly. Expect minutes, not seconds. For a leaderboard that changes a few times an hour that is genuinely fine. For a final round where the room is watching the top two, it is not.
Version History Is Your Audit Trail.
File, Version history, See version history. Sheets shows you every change, when it happened, and who made it. Click a version and the changed cells are highlighted.
This is a real advantage and it is worth knowing before you need it. When a client asks why a team's score moved, you can answer instead of guessing. Excel cannot do this in any practical way.
It will not stop the error. It will let you find it.
Worth knowing what it costs you to use, though. Version history is a file-level diff. Finding the moment one team's score changed means scrubbing through versions at speed while a client waits for an answer.
Protect The Formulas.
The most common way an event spreadsheet fails is somebody helpful tidying it. A dragged cell, a deleted row that looked empty, a number typed over a formula. The sheet keeps producing results and they are wrong.
Right-click the leaderboard tab, Protect sheet, and restrict editing to yourself. Do the same for the setup tab. Leave only the entry grid open, or only the form.
Five minutes. Do it every time.
Where This Still Breaks.
Sheets fixes collaboration, history and the screen. It does not fix the rest.
Permissions are all or nothing, roughly. Protected ranges help, but a facilitator with edit access can still see and reach the whole event. There is no "this person sees station four only".
Duplicate submissions. Forms will take the same score twice from a facilitator who wasn't sure it went through. You handle that with a formula choice, and you have to make that choice in advance.
Venue wifi. Sheets needs a connection. Offline mode on a shared file is not something to plan an event around, and ballroom wifi is not something to plan anything around.
The client cuts a game. Not adds one. Cuts one, at 11am, because the morning overran. Everything downstream was built around six games and now there are five. Weightings wrong, conversions wrong, and someone is rebuilding formulas while teams walk to the next station. Sheets does not help with this at all.
It is still a spreadsheet on a screen. Gridlines, the wrong font, and the client's logo nowhere. Publishing to web tidies it. It does not transform it.
So When Is This Enough?
Very often. Be honest with yourself about your own volume before spending anything.
If you run a handful of events a year, Sheets plus a Form plus a published tab is a genuinely good system and it costs nothing. Set it up once, protect the formulas, and use it. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
If you are running two or three teams, don't even do that. A whiteboard is fine.
The maths changes with volume. We run 200 to 300 events a year, sometimes ten in a week, occasionally with five thousand people on site. At that scale a shared sheet is not free. It costs an event manager's afternoon per event, plus a second person checking, because at ten events a week the odds of one wrong number somewhere are no longer small.
We know, because it happened. A team took several games clearly and the standings put someone else first. We caught it early. It still cost us a replacement prize, because the result had been read out.
That was the point at which we stopped patching the sheet and built GamesTally Score. Facilitators enter from their phones with a view of their station only. Scoring rules are applied centrally, so a cut game is a setting rather than a rebuild. On tournament match scoring, two people cannot silently overwrite each other, and that check is being extended to the rest. Every change is logged against the person who made it. And the standings go on the client's screen in the client's branding, updating as the score lands rather than on a timer.
USD 4,000, once, rather than per event. But get to the volume first. Until then, build the sheet.
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