With a big sports tournament approaching, the competitive spirit starts to wake up in many work teams. Whether it is a hockey championship, a football tournament or another major event, watching the results together and comparing predictions is a great way to connect colleagues across departments. Most of these initiatives start in exactly the same way. Someone on the team opens a spreadsheet, creates columns for names, rows for matches and sends out the link by email.
At first glance, it might seem that Excel handles a prediction league without any problems. After all, spreadsheets are made for working with data, numbers and calculations. In the first days of the tournament, everything runs fairly smoothly. People enter their predictions, the organiser tries to keep order and in the offices people talk about who had the better guess for the evening match.
Over time and with the growing number of matches played, however, the cracks start to show. A fun activity turns, for the organiser, into an unpaid administrative role and, for the participants, into a confusing jumble of cells on their mobile phone screens. This article offers an objective comparison of both approaches. We will look at the situations in which a spreadsheet is a perfectly fine choice, and at when it makes sense to look around for a different solution.
Why Excel sounds tempting
Before we get into the pitfalls, we have to give spreadsheets credit for their undeniable qualities. They are versatile, powerful tools that you find on every company computer. The decision to start there is perfectly logical and backed by several strong arguments.
First of all, there is availability. Creating a new document costs nothing and does not require approval from the IT department. Setting up the basic structure takes someone who works with spreadsheets regularly about ten minutes. Sharing is also a matter of a few clicks in today's cloud-based world.
Another advantage is absolute freedom. You can colour the cells in company colours, add your own columns for notes or build an arbitrarily complex system of calculations. For many people, a prediction pool in Excel is a safe zone, because they move within an environment they know well from their everyday work. If you are organising a small, one-off event for a few of your closest colleagues, these advantages often outweigh any shortcomings.
Limits of Excel you will quickly run into
The versatility of spreadsheets is their greatest strength, but in the context of a live, interactive competition it is also their greatest weakness. They are simply not designed for the smooth user experience of dozens of people who access the data from different devices and at different times. Here are the main areas where you will sooner or later hit the limits.
Someone has to type in the results manually
Sports tournaments do not ask about your working hours. Matches are played in the evening, on weekends or even at night. If your shared spreadsheet evaluates predictions based on formulas, those formulas need input data. After every match, someone has to open the spreadsheet and write the actual result into it.
For the organiser, this means that, for the duration of the tournament, they cannot simply switch off. Instead of enjoying the game, they become an administrator. If a match ends at ten in the evening and the organiser only enters the result the next morning after arriving at the office, the whole competition loses its momentum. Participants want to see how their position has changed immediately after the final whistle.
Scoring kept in your head or in formulas, easy to break
Setting up fair scoring is not a trivial matter. Typically you want to reward participants with different numbers of points for an exactly guessed result, for correctly picking the winner, or possibly for the correct goal margin. Translating this logic into spreadsheet functions requires an advanced knowledge of nested conditions.
Even if you manage to create the perfect formula, in a shared document environment a single careless click by any of the participants is enough. Someone accidentally deletes a cell with a calculation, pastes a value in the wrong format or shifts an entire row. Suddenly half the spreadsheet shows error values and the organiser has to track down exactly where the structure was damaged and how to get the document back into a working state.
Nobody knows where they stand
The basic engine of any competition is the running standings. People want to compare themselves, they want to know whether they have just overtaken a colleague from the next office. In a regular spreadsheet, keeping the standings up to date is often complicated. It requires either constant manual sorting of the data by number of points, or building complex pivot tables and helper sheets.
If automatic standings are missing, the betting pool loses its magic. Participants see only a huge matrix of numbers from which they cannot tell at a glance who is actually leading. As a result, they keep asking the organiser about the current status, which again increases the administrative burden.
Mobile use is painful
Most interactions with sports events today happen through mobile phones. People want to enter their predictions on the way home from work, on the tram or in the evening from the sofa. But opening a shared spreadsheet with fifty columns and dozens of rows on a six-inch display is a test of patience.
Participants have to keep panning the screen in all directions and pinching to zoom in and out to hit the right tiny cell. The risk that they will write their prediction into someone else's row or against the wrong match is extremely high on a mobile device. This discomfort often leads some colleagues to stop filling in their predictions altogether, because the process itself is too frustrating.
Predictions can be changed after the match
Trust is the foundation of any fair competition. Once a match starts, predictions should be locked and no one should be able to edit them retroactively. Spreadsheets do offer cell-locking features, but managing them in real time is virtually impossible for the organiser. They would have to sit at the computer exactly at the time of the opening face-off or kick-off and manually change edit rights for specific cells.
In practice this means the spreadsheets stay open. That creates room for doubt. If someone miraculously guesses the exact result of a surprising match, there will always be someone who asks whether the value was not edited after the first period. Even though the document keeps an edit history, going through it is tedious and unclear.
Participants have to remember the deadline themselves
In the rush of work it is easy to forget that an important match is on this evening. With a spreadsheet solution, all responsibility for meeting deadlines lies with the participants themselves. The organiser often takes on the role of reminder and sends group messages through company communication channels to warn colleagues about the approaching cut-off. That is another step that costs time and energy, and even so, there will always be someone who misses the deadline and ends up disappointed.
What a dedicated tool does differently
When we look at the problems described above, it is clear that they do not stem from spreadsheets being a bad tool. They stem from them being used for a process they were not built for. This is where an alternative to Excel for prediction pools comes in, designed from the ground up for this specific purpose.
A dedicated platform removes the administrative burden. Real match results are pushed into the system automatically from external data sources. As soon as the referee ends the match, the system instantly recalculates points for all participants. The organiser can therefore fully focus on the competition itself and does not have to spend evenings retyping numbers.
The user experience is tailored to modern standards. For example, thanks to PWA (Progressive Web App) technology, the platform runs on mobile phones as smoothly as a native app. Participants can add it to their phone's home screen without having to download anything from the app stores. The interface is clean, clear and designed for touch operation.
A key element is also the automation of the rules. The system itself watches the start time of each match. The moment the match starts, the option to add or edit predictions is automatically locked. No one can cheat and trust in the fairness of the competition is one hundred percent. At the same time, the platform solves the problem of forgetting through push notifications that alert participants in good time to upcoming matches.
If you are interested in more details about how such a system works in practice, you can read more in the about trefa.app section, where the technical and user advantages of this solution are described.
When Excel is still enough
The aim of this comparison is not to claim that spreadsheets have no place in organising competitions. There are situations in which their use is perfectly defensible.
Imagine that you work in a small office of five people. You decide to try predicting the results only for the final weekend, which amounts to a grand total of three or four matches. It is a one-off event you agreed on over morning coffee. In that case there is no point in setting up any new system. You open the shared document, write four rows and on Monday morning over coffee you check who got closest. For such a small scope, where everyone knows everyone else and the volume of data is minimal, a generic spreadsheet is a quick and functional solution.
When it is time to switch
The line between when a spreadsheet is a useful helper and when it becomes a burden is fairly sharp. There are several clear signals which suggest your community prediction league has reached a stage where it needs a more robust backbone.
The first indicator is the number of participants. As soon as more than ten to fifteen people join the competition, navigating the rows and columns becomes confusing and the risk of errors grows exponentially. Another signal is the repetition of the contest. If you are organising the event for the second or third year in a row, your colleagues naturally expect a higher standard and a smoother experience.
You should also pay attention when participants keep asking you things like "How many points do I have now?" or "Can I still change my prediction for tomorrow's match?". These questions clearly show that users do not have the information they need in real time. If, on top of that, most colleagues try to access the spreadsheet from mobile devices and complain about poor usability, it is time to consider dedicated features that eliminate these obstacles.
For inspiration on how such an event can work in a company at a professional level, take a look at the guide to organising a betting pool for the 2026 Hockey World Championship.
What switching looks like in practice
Many organisers are hesitant to leave their well-worn spreadsheets behind for fear that switching to a new system will be complex and time-consuming. In reality, this process is surprisingly simple. Dedicated platforms are designed to minimise any entry barrier.
Setting up a new competition takes about five minutes. As administrator, you just pick the tournament you want to follow and configure the scoring rules according to your team's habits. The system then generates a unique link, which you simply send to your colleagues. There is no need to export anything from old documents, every new tournament is a clean start.
Participants do not have to bother with inventing new passwords or filling in long registration forms. It is enough to sign in with Google and they can start entering their predictions immediately. The whole process is intuitive, and for a detailed sense of the user experience take a look at how it works.
Frequently asked questions
When considering a switch to a dedicated platform, similar questions tend to come up. Here are answers to the most common ones.
What does running such a competition cost? For most regular work teams, the cost is not an obstacle. The platform is provided free for up to 20 participants. For larger corporate leagues with more colleagues on board, individual terms can be arranged, but for a standard department or smaller company, there are no financial commitments.
Will colleagues have to install another app on their phone? No, that is not necessary. The system works as a Progressive Web App (PWA). That means it behaves like a normal app but loads directly from the web browser. There is nothing to look for and download via the App Store or Google Play.
Who decides how points are awarded? Full control over the rules belongs to the competition administrator, i.e. the person setting up the league. They can configure different point values for the exact result, for correctly predicting the winner or to take the goal margin into account.
Which sporting events are supported? The system covers the most popular competitions as standard, including NHL, the Czech Extraliga, the Ice Hockey World Championship, the Premier League, the FIFA World Cup, UEFA EURO and the Olympic Games. If you are interested in another specific league, just message us on Facebook and we will gladly add it on request. You will find further technical details in the FAQ section.
Get started for free
Organising a corporate competition should be a joy, not an administrative burden. If you feel that your current solution in the form of shared spreadsheets is hitting its limits, bringing more stress than fun and not giving your colleagues a comfortable experience, this is the ideal time to try a more modern approach. Remove the friction, hand the technical worries over to automation and focus on what matters most — the joy of sport and healthy rivalry in the team. You can try it free with no commitment and judge the difference for yourself.