That viral spreadsheet everyone's sharing forgot the part about data entry time

My buddy in Cleveland sent me a link to that 'ultimate budgeting tracker' with 12 tabs and color coded formulas, but after 3 hours of setting it up I found the auto-import feature is fake and you have to type every receipt manually, so who else bailed on those pretty templates and went back to a plain text file?

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butler.shane3d ago

3 hours of setting it up" is exactly why I quit those things too. The pretty colors and dropdowns fool you into thinking it's saving time, but then you realize the real work is just typing in every single purchase anyway. Plain text is way faster because you stop pretending you're going to categorize every coffee and just write down the big stuff. I keep a running list in Notepad and add numbers once a week. Takes ten minutes tops. The spreadsheet people are really just paying for the satisfaction of watching a pie chart update, not for actual time saved.