A spreadsheet gives you total control and costs nothing, but you must find and type every value, and a mistyped digit cannot be checked against the report it came from. NannaLife reads the reports instead, normalizes names and units across labs, and keeps each value linked to its source. If you enjoy the sheet and want custom calculations, keep the sheet.
Where a spreadsheet quietly wins
- You decide the columns. Symptoms, medication changes, cycle day, how you felt that week - nothing is off limits.
- You can calculate anything. Ratios, rolling averages, standard deviations, correlations. NannaLife is not a calculator and does not pretend to be.
- You can graph anything, including markers plotted against something that is not a lab value.
- Formatting is yours. Flags, colour rules, a sheet you actually enjoy opening.
- It works offline and it never changes shape underneath you.
- It is portable. A CSV is readable by almost anything, including tools that do not exist yet.
Where it breaks
- Entry is the whole cost. Every value comes from a PDF you have to open, read, and retype. Twelve markers across four reports is nearly fifty numbers, typed correctly.
- Errors are invisible.
10.7instead of107looks like a real result forever, because the sheet has no copy of the source report to check against. - Reference ranges shift. Ranges are printed per lab, so a sheet with one "normal" column goes quietly wrong when you change labs.
- Units drift. The same marker in mg/dL at one lab and mmol/L at another produces two incompatible columns unless you convert by hand.
- The upkeep decays. Most sheets are diligent for a year or two, then stop at the exact moment history becomes interesting.
- Nothing explains anything. A number in a cell tells you nothing about what the marker measures or why it might have moved.
Side by side
| What matters | Spreadsheet | NannaLife |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | Free, every feature |
| Getting values in | Typed by hand | Read from the report automatically |
| Risk of transcription error | High, and undetectable | Verify against the linked source |
| Custom columns and formulas | Unlimited | Not supported |
| Cross-lab normalization | Manual | Names and units |
| Reference range handling | One column, or manual per lab | Per result, from its own report |
| Original report retained | No | Yes, linked to every value |
| Explains what a marker means | No | Per biomarker |
| Ask questions of your own results | No | With NannaDoc |
| Effort over five years | Grows with every report | One upload per report |
The honest recommendation
Keep the spreadsheet if
- You want computations NannaLife does not do, like ratios or correlations.
- You track things that are not lab values alongside them.
- You are meticulous about data entry and genuinely enjoy the sheet.
- You need your data as a plain file you control completely.
Use NannaLife if
- The typing is why your sheet stopped at 2024.
- You use more than one lab and the units no longer match.
- You want to check a suspicious value against the report it came from.
- You would rather read an explanation than a bare cell.
The realistic combination is both: NannaLife for the reading, the timeline, and the source links, and a small sheet for the two or three derived numbers you care about.