Spreadsheet vs. RallyIQ for Draw Management
Where a spreadsheet stops coping, and what an event engine does instead.
In defence of the spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is a genuinely good tool for this, up to a point. It is free, everyone can read one, it works with no internet, and for a fixed group of eight playing the same format every week it is honestly hard to beat.
The question is not whether spreadsheets work. It is where they stop.
The four places it breaks
1. Partner rotation. Making sure nobody partners the same person twice, while everyone plays equally, is a real combinatorial problem. By hand it is guesswork, and the errors are invisible until someone notices they have partnered the same person three times.
2. Re-seeding between rounds. If you want round two's groups to reflect round one's results, you re-sort the whole field and rebuild every group by hand, in the ten minutes while players wait.
3. Corrections. A wrong score in round one should change the standings, the rating, and every subsequent group. In a spreadsheet it changes one cell, and you either accept an inconsistent event or redo it manually.
4. Sharing. A spreadsheet on your laptop is not visible from court three. So you read the draw aloud, repeatedly, all evening.
What an event engine does instead
An engine holds the constraints rather than asking you to. Specifically, RallyIQ:
- Splits the field into pools of 4 to 6, cut at the real gaps in standard.
- Builds a schedule where everyone plays the same number of games and no partnership repeats.
- Assigns each sitting player to umpire, and evens out first serve.
- Rates every match on performance against expectation, so the next round's pools reflect how people are actually playing.
- Lets players enter their own court's score.
- Publishes a live link that needs no account.
- Recalculates the whole event cleanly when you correct a score.
- Exports the lot as a spreadsheet, so you still own your history.
When to stay with the spreadsheet
Genuinely: if you run one fixed group of eight, the same format every week, with no interest in ratings, a spreadsheet is fine and switching buys you little.
The tipping point is roughly 16 players, or the moment you want groups to change based on results. Past that, the manual work grows faster than the event does.
Common questions
Can I keep using my spreadsheet alongside?
Yes. RallyIQ exports the whole event as a multi-sheet Excel workbook, so your own records and formulas carry on working.
What about my history?
Past events stay in your spreadsheet and remain readable. Ratings start fresh, which is unavoidable - a rating has to be built from matches the system actually observed.
Is it harder to use than a spreadsheet?
Different rather than harder. You stop editing cells and start generating rounds. The first event takes a little learning; the second is faster than the spreadsheet was.
Run your next event on RallyIQ
Build the draw, score live across every court, and share results with a link.