The restaurant spreadsheet: a love letter and an intervention

October 15, 2026 · 2 min read

If you track restaurants in a spreadsheet, this post sees you. Columns for name and neighborhood. A status field with data validation. Conditional formatting on the rating column. Maybe — respect — a pivot table.

Spreadsheet people are the most serious restaurant trackers there are, and they’ve usually thought harder about the problem than any app designer. So this is half love letter, half intervention.

The love letter

The spreadsheet gets three big things right:

Structure. Sheet people understood instinctively what the Apple Notes crowd learns the hard way: a restaurant record has fields. Name, area, status, rating, dish, source, date. Structure is what makes ten years of data queryable instead of nostalgic.

Your own scale. No app’s opinion of what a rating means. Half-points, letter grades, separate columns for food and vibes — the sheet doesn’t argue.

Analysis. Sort by rating. Filter to neighborhood. Count your visits by cuisine. No tracking app matches a pivot table, and none ever will.

The intervention

And yet. Three failure modes, and every sheet owner knows at least two personally:

Capture friction. The sheet lives at a desk; recommendations happen at dinners. Adding a row on a phone — open app, find sheet, find row, type across seven columns — takes ninety seconds of fiddling that a mid-conversation moment doesn’t have. So places queue in your head for “later,” and the sheet slowly diverges from your actual life. The ten-second capture rule is where sheets die.

No map. The question your system faces in the field is “what’s on my list near here?” A sheet has coordinates for nothing and an answer for nobody.

The freshness spiral. Because updating is a chore, it batches. Because it batches, it’s always slightly stale. Because it’s stale, you trust it less. Because you trust it less, you update it less. Every abandoned sheet died of this spiral, not of bad column design.

The peace treaty

Here’s the resolution I’ve landed on, and it doesn’t require abandoning the sheet: let the phone do capture and retrieval; let the sheet do analysis.

A tracker like GoodEats handles the field work — two-tap saves from your maps app, shelves for been/want-to-go, ratings at the table, the map when you’re standing somewhere hungry. Then, because everything exports as a clean JSON file whenever you want, your spreadsheet gets a periodic data drop for the deep analysis no app will ever do. (No account, no server — the export is genuinely your data, which spreadsheet people care about more than anyone.)

The sheet was never the mistake. Asking it to be fast at a taco truck was.

Keep the pivot tables. Retire the friction.

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