A roster in a spreadsheet, or a roster app?

Why the spreadsheet is where most rosters start

At Riverbend Tennis Club the court-sweeping roster lived in one Google Sheet for six years. Hamish set it up: a column of Saturdays, a column per court, names typed in. It cost nothing, everyone knew how to open it, and when Priya wanted to know her next turn she searched for her name.

That is the honest case for a spreadsheet. You already have it, you can shape it any way you like, and nobody needs to learn anything. Google Sheets lets you choose who can view, comment or edit, keeps a version history, and opens on a phone. Excel does the same jobs, and both print well.

If your roster is one team, one job, a dozen people and a list that rarely changes, a spreadsheet may be all you ever need. Our free roster template and roster maker give you a clean starting sheet.

Where the sheet starts to cost you

Riverbend’s sheet didn’t break in one go. It wore down:

• Somebody types over someone else. Liam swapped with Mei by editing two cells, and nobody else knew until two people turned up with brooms.
• Counting turns is your job. To see whether Dev had done more than Yuki, Hamish counted down the column by hand, or wrote a formula that broke when someone inserted a row.
• New dates are typed in. Every term, a fresh block of Saturdays, copied and pasted, with the public holiday weekend to fix.
• People leave. When Olu moved away, his twelve future turns had to be handed out one by one, and the new list was lopsided for months.
• Away is a message, not a cell. “I’m overseas in July” arrives by text, and has to be remembered when the July rows get filled.

None of that is the spreadsheet’s fault. A sheet holds whatever you type; it doesn’t know that a cell is a turn, or that a person can’t be in two places at nine o’clock.

Side by side

What changes when the roster is an app

In FairTurns, you click a day to add a date and choose how it repeats, such as “Every second Saturday”. The dates are kept 3 to 12 months ahead, so new Saturdays appear as old ones pass. Each team can have positions with a headcount, so “Courts, 2 people” makes two places on every date.

Fill then puts people into the empty places, each one going to whoever has had the fewest turns in that position. It never moves anyone already on. People mark the days they’re away, and Fill leaves them off those days. When someone leaves, Redistribute hands their dates out and shows you every person who gains or loses one before anything changes.

Everyone sees the same roster on a public roster link: names and dates, no sign-in, nothing to install. It is all free, for any number of people. Pro adds the emails: reminders, the schedule to the team, and “I can do it” or “I can’t make it” replies.

When to keep the spreadsheet

Keep the sheet if you need columns FairTurns doesn’t have: hours worked, money collected, a notes column per person. FairTurns has no export to a file and no payroll or timesheets. It is a roster: who is on, and when. If the sheet is quick for you and nobody is confused, there is no need to move.

Moving across takes about ten minutes: paste your list of names into FairTurns (no emails are sent), add your repeating dates, and press Fill. You can keep the old sheet as a record.

Questions

Checked against Google’s and Microsoft’s own pages on 24 October 2026; prices and features change, so check theirs before you decide.