Excel is the default tool for thousands of coaches. Convenient at first, it quickly becomes a bottleneck: slow formatting, impossible sharing, no structured history. Here's why more and more coaches are making the switch.
It's Friday evening. Your swimmers have a session on Sunday. You open the Excel file you've been using for three years, add a new tab, paste the blocks from last week, adjust the distances, fight with column widths for ten minutes, then export a PDF and send it to the team WhatsApp group. Two hours later, a swimmer messages you: "I can't open the file."
That's not a rare experience. It's the standard process for thousands of coaches. Excel wasn't built for swimming training. It's a calculation tool pressed into service as a session editor, a communication tool, and a planning system all at once. That it works at all is impressive. But the cracks show fast.
Excel is excellent at calculations, budgets, and structured data. It handles a 5,000-row financial table without complaining. What it doesn't handle well is the specific needs of a swimming coach.
A training session isn't a spreadsheet. It's a sequence of blocks with strokes, distances, zones, and instructions. In Excel, there's no concept of "a warm-up set of 4×50m on 1:10 in zone 2." You build that from scratch, cell by cell, and hope the formatting holds on mobile.
The real cost of Excel isn't the license fee. It's time. Estimating conservatively, a coach who formats one session per week spends roughly 20 to 30 minutes on layout alone. Over a full season of 40 weeks, that's between 13 and 20 hours spent fighting column widths and cell merges.
There's also the history problem. Sessions created in Excel are files, not records. Finding a session from eight months ago means digging through folders, opening five files, and guessing which tab had the October block training. No searchable history. No seasonal overview.
| Critère | Criterion | Excel | Padlie |
|---|---|---|---|
| Session creation time | 20–30 min (formatting included) | 3–5 min | |
| Sharing method | PDF export + WhatsApp / email | Shareable link | |
| Swimmer access | Download PDF, needs a viewer | Opens in browser, no account required | |
| History | Folders of files | Calendar with all past sessions | |
| Mobile experience | Variable (depends on export) | Optimised for phone | |
| Free plan | Yes (Microsoft 365 or free version) | Yes (up to 5 swimmers) |
It's worth being honest: there are cases where Excel is the right tool. A one-time intensive camp. A template so established that rebuilding it elsewhere would cost more than it saves. An organisation that mandates Excel for all documents.
But if you're coaching regularly, with the same group, week after week, the overhead compounds. Each session you format is time taken from preparation, recovery analysis, or simply rest.
The coaches who switch rarely go back. Not because the tool is perfect, but because the friction of the old process becomes visible only once it's gone.
If you want to see how much faster session planning can be, Padlie's free plan lets you create sessions, share them as links, and access a full history — no credit card required.
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