Guide
A free trading journal spreadsheet template (and when to stop using one)
Published · 5 min read
A spreadsheet is a perfectly good trading journal to start with. It is free, it is yours, and it will do whatever you tell it. This page gives you a template with the columns that matter and nothing else, shows how to get a P&L-per-day view out of it in a few minutes, and then says plainly where a spreadsheet stops being enough and what to do about it. The template is a CSV file, so it opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers or anything else.
A header row and three example rows from LogBook's demo account. The numbers are made up.
The columns, and why each one is there
Fifteen columns. Seven of them are the fields from our checklist; the rest exist to make the sheet sortable and the pivot tables possible.
| Column | What goes in it | Why |
|---|---|---|
| date | 2026-10-28 | Year-month-day, so sorting and grouping by day just work. |
| time | 09:34 | Entry time. Lets you group by hour later. |
| instrument | Saab B | The underlying, not the product code. |
| side | Long or Short | Needed for a breakdown by direction. |
| entry | 512.40 | Fill price. Decimal point, see the note on Excel below. |
| exit | 507.40 | Fill price. |
| quantity | 100 | Shares or contracts. |
| fees | 21.54 | Courtage, both legs. |
| result_kr | -521.54 | Net result in kronor, after fees. A loss with a minus. This is the column every total uses. |
| risk_kr | 500 | What you would have lost at your stop. Optional, but it makes R possible. |
| r | -1.04 | result_kr divided by risk_kr. Lets you compare trades of different size. |
| grade | A, B or C | How well you followed the plan, not how it ended. |
| setup | Opening range breakout | One short name from a list you keep short. |
| mistakes | Chased entry | Empty on most rows, which is the point. |
| notes | One sentence | Why you took it, written before the story forms. |
The three example rows are from LogBook's demo account: a planned Saab B trade that lost, a Volvo B pullback that hit its target, and a DAX mini that was chased late. They are there so you can see the format, not as a suggestion of what your month will look like.
A note on Excel in Swedish
The file uses commas between columns and a decimal point in numbers, which is what Google Sheets and most tools expect. Excel with Swedish settings expects semicolons and decimal commas, so if you double-click the file every row lands in one cell. Instead, open Excel, go to Data → From Text/CSV, choose the file, set the delimiter to Comma, and under the advanced options set the decimal separator to a point. Google Sheets opens the file directly with File → Import.
P&L per day in Google Sheets
The single most useful view a journal can give you is the result per day, laid out so a bad week is visible as a shape. In Sheets it takes about two minutes:
- Select all your data, including the header row.
- Insert → Pivot table, on a new sheet.
- Under Rows, add date. Under Values, add result_kr, summarised by SUM.
- Add result_kr a second time under Values, summarised by COUNTA. That is your trade count per day.
- Optional: add grade under Columns. Now each day shows how much came from A, B and C trades.
For a weekly view, add a column to your data called week with the formula =ISOWEEKNUM(A2) copied down, and use it under Rows instead of date. For a breakdown by setup, swap date for setup under Rows and look at SUM and COUNTA together: a setup with a positive sum and three trades is not yet a good setup, it is three trades. Excel's PivotTable works the same way with the same fields.
What the spreadsheet is good at
- It is free, with no account and no company that can change its mind.
- It is yours. The file sits on your disk or in your Drive, and nothing can lock you out of it.
- It bends. A new column takes ten seconds. A new chart takes a minute. Nobody decides for you what a journal should contain.
- It is honest about samples. When your pivot table shows one setup with four trades, you can see the four.
For the first thirty trades, this is enough, and we would rather you kept a spreadsheet than paid for a journal you abandon in two weeks.
Where it starts to break
The spreadsheet does not fail all at once. It fails on the days when logging is hardest, which are the days that matter most.
- Screenshots. A chart is the fastest way to remember a trade a month later, and a cell cannot hold one. Links to a folder of images work until the folder has sixty files called Screenshot 2026-10-28 at 09.41.
- The phone. Filling fifteen columns in a mobile spreadsheet app between two trades is not something anyone does twice. So the trade gets logged tonight, after the story has formed.
- The calendar. A pivot table tells you the numbers; a calendar shows you the shape of the month, red days next to green, and a bad week you can see without reading. Building one in Sheets is possible, and most people never do.
- The routine. A plan written in the morning that the evening checks you against lives in a different sheet, or a notebook, or nowhere. The journal and the plan stop talking to each other.
- The small-sample trap. Nothing in a spreadsheet dims a 100 % win rate on two trades. You have to remember to distrust it yourself, every time.
A straight recommendation
If you are not sure you will keep a journal at all, start with the spreadsheet. Download the template, log the next ten trades, and do one weekly review with the pivot table. It costs nothing, and if the habit does not stick, you have lost nothing either.
If you have thirty trades in the sheet and you are still logging, switch to a journal built for it. By then you know the habit is real, and the spreadsheet is costing you the screenshots, the phone and the calendar. LogBook is one option: it is free, the form is the seven fields above, a chart pastes in with Ctrl V, the calendar is already built, and you can export everything back to CSV whenever you want. The comparison page covers the paid journals too, and says what they do better than we do.
Whatever you choose, the habit guide applies: five fields, logged within a minute, reviewed once a week.