Comparison
Digital logbook for paragliding: what changes vs Excel
Many pilots keep their flights in an Excel sheet: date, site, duration. It works, but it stops at the table row. A digital logbook starts from the IGC and derives much more. Here is the comparison, without overselling.
What Excel does well
A spreadsheet is simple, yours and offline. For noting date, take-off, landing, duration and a few personal notes it is perfect, and it depends on no service.
What Excel cannot do
The limit arrives when you want to understand the flight, not just record it. A sheet does not read the track: everything inside the IGC stays unused.
- 3D replay: watch the line back on real terrain, instead of imagining it from a cell.
- Derived metrics: glides, climb rate, altitude and distance computed from the B-records, not typed in by hand.
- Map and thermals: where you found lift and where you lost altitude, on the map.
- Automatic trends: the season that updates itself with every flight uploaded.
- Comparison: putting two flights or two pilots side by side with the same parameters.
When it makes sense to switch
If you fly rarely and a list is enough, Excel is perfectly fine: no need to change. But if you fly XC and want to understand why one flight went better than another, the sheet becomes the bottleneck: the data is already in the IGC, but you are not reading it.
RSFly starts here: you upload the IGC and the logbook, replay and metrics build themselves, staying private until you choose to share them.
In short
- Excel is great for noting; it cannot read the IGC track.
- A digital logbook derives replay, metrics and maps from the flight, with no manual entry.
- If you fly rarely a sheet is enough; if you fly XC the value is in the data Excel ignores.