[JasonB]

With the proliferation of tables and spreadsheets involved in Graham's excellent Rally Proxy series it set me off thinking about the possibilities of using Google Sheets, and how we might use it practically in the sort of real world situations that we might encounter. With the number of entries in the rally proxy and the complexity of the different events and classes, it struck me that this might be a good time to evaluate Google's spreadsheet capabilities with a set of real data, from a real event.

Before we get to that though, let's just look at the basics, and the pros and cons of using Google Sheets...

Disadvantages...

• Familiarity - If you are used to using Excel, or any other spreadsheet application like Open Office, Libre Office, or such like, it does take a little while to get used to Google Sheets. It's similar, it does most of the same things, but I found myself stumbling around for a while, trying to find out how to achieve certain things. I guess that's inevitable when you use new software.
  
• Capability - Google Sheets isn't as sophisticated as Excel or other desktop apps, or at least it doesn't seem it after a couple of days of use. But unless you're a spreadsheet wizard dealing with massive data sets, I suspect you'd find most of what you want.
  
• Quirks - Things don't always work as you'd expect, and the fact that it's a web based app means that if you have a dodgy internet connection as I do, there can be slight, unexpected delays, which can interrupt your workflow, which is annoying. There are also a few things which can can completely spoil your work if you're not aware of them.
  

Advantages...

• Free - It is completely free, though there are also desktop apps that are also free.
  
• Collaborative - I haven't tested this out, but I believe you can allow other people to access and edit the spreadsheet, so you could perhaps allow each host in a proxy event to enter their own results, or maybe just share the work around between a few trusted people.
  
• Sharing - This is the big one for me, especially since sharing our hobby is  what this forum is all about. Rather than posting images of the tables and spreadsheets, it's possible, not easy but possible to post live spreadsheets.
  

Please allow me to explain and demonstrate that last point. Here is an example of a spreadsheet using the first four stages of the Rally Cars Slotting Proxy 2023...



This is not an official thing, Graham's posts over on the thread are the only official results, and I'm sure I've made loads of mistakes entering the info, and I have no idea how the points system works.

But it's a live spreadsheet, which will update here on the forum whenever the data on Google sheets is updated, and I've organised it to have various tabs at the bottom to show different info.

As I said before it's not easy, the organiser would have to set up the spreadsheet, share the embed code with me, and then I could set up the forum code to allow them to post it wherever they wanted. We wouldn't be able to do it for every table  and spreadsheet, it would have to be something like the sheet above that could cater for the whole series, but it's possible, and maybe worth thinking about.