Tracking a reactive dog in a spreadsheet

Because a spreadsheet asks for the work at the worst possible moment and pays it back weeks later. Everything else — the drifting categories, the missing times, the rows filled in from memory at ten at night — follows from that one thing.

Why it usually falls apart

Five failures, and they are the same five every time.

You cannot fill it in at the time. You have a lead in one hand, a dog that has just gone off in the other, and adrenaline. A spreadsheet needs two hands, a keyboard and a moment of calm, and none of those exist thirty seconds after a reaction. So the row gets typed later.

Typed later means typed from memory, which is the problem you were trying to solve. By the evening you have the outline and not the details, and the details are the part that carries the information.

Free text drifts. Week one you write "dog". Week three, "another dog". Week five, "big dog off lead", "loose dog", "dog running". They are the same category and your sheet now treats them as five, so nothing counts and nothing groups. This is the single most common reason a sheet that was filled in diligently still tells you nothing.

• Free text, five spellings of one trigger
• The same week under one fixed category

Recovery never gets timed. It is the field that carries the most information and the only one that needs a stopwatch running while you are still upset. Almost nobody starts one, so the column fills with "a few minutes" — which is not a number and cannot be compared with next week's "a few minutes".

Relating stays manual. Rows are not a pattern. To find out whether Thursday was bad because of Tuesday you have to build that comparison yourself, every time, and after a long day nobody does. So the sheet quietly becomes a diary you never read.

Underneath all five is the thing that actually kills it: writing an entry costs something today and gives nothing back for weeks. Effort that stays a cost stops.

Where a spreadsheet genuinely wins

This is not a straw man. There are four things a sheet does that no app on this page does better, and if any of them matter to you, keep the sheet.

It is free, and it is already on your computer.

It is yours. No account, no subscription, no company deciding next year that the export format is changing. If you want your data in ten years, a .csv will still open.

The columns are whatever you want. If you are tracking something specific to your dog — a medication, a supplement, a particular route, a flatmate's schedule — no app will have your field and a sheet will.

It works everywhere. Android, desktop, shared with a trainer as a file attached to an email.

If you are keeping one, four things make it survive

Worth more than any argument about tools.

One row per event, not per walk. A walk with three encounters is three rows. Walk-level rows average away exactly what you are looking for.

Fixed categories, never free text. Build a dropdown list before you start and refuse to add to it in the field. Six or seven trigger types is plenty. The discipline feels excessive on day one and it is the difference between a sheet that groups and one that does not.

Log on the phone, tidy on the computer. Voice memo, note, three words — anything that takes five seconds while it is happening. Transcribe into the sheet later. The capture and the tidying are different jobs and trying to do both at once is what kills the capture.

A recovery column in whole minutes, started at the moment the trigger leaves and stopped when your dog is genuinely back with you. Not "a bit", not "ages". A number, taken at the time.

A word about "threshold distances" specifically

People usually build these sheets around distance, because it is the one thing that feels measurable and controllable.

Record it, roughly — it is one of the four fields worth having. But do not build the sheet as though the goal were to find your dog's number, because the number moves. The same distance produces different outcomes on different days, and a column of distances with no column for what the preceding days contained will look like noise. That is not your spreadsheet failing. That is the thing being measured.

The one thing a sheet cannot give you

Rows are a record. What you actually want is the relationship between them: whether recovery is shortening, which triggers matter for your dog rather than for dogs in general, and whether today has less room in it than usual because of what the last few days held.

A spreadsheet can be made to answer all of that. It takes formulas you will write once and maintain forever, and a willingness to sit down with it weekly. Some people genuinely enjoy that, and if you are one of them you do not need an app.

For everyone else, that maintenance is the whole reason the sheet dies. CalmDogs records the same four fields and times the recovery for you, and reads the accumulated total of the previous few days back to you the next morning — which is the analysis most people were intending to do in the sheet and never got round to.

If you take nothing else from this

The fields matter more than the tool. Trigger, rough distance, what your dog did, how long they took to settle — captured at the time, with fixed names, one row per event.

Get that right in a spreadsheet and you will be ahead of most people using an app.