A finds list against your own Google Sheet
The same rows, two different failure modes
Both hold rows about products. What separates them is who can change the rows and what happens when they go stale.
A personal spreadsheet
- You can edit any cell, which means you can also break a formula and not notice.
- It holds exactly what you typed, including the fields you decided were not worth typing.
- It has no readers, so a wrong row costs only you — and it never gets corrected by anyone else.
- It is the right place for candidate rows, budget arithmetic and notes to yourself.
A published finds page
- Nobody can edit it, so a reading stays a reading rather than drifting into an opinion.
- It holds fields chosen for the reader — source platform, category, reference price with a date attached.
- It has readers, which is exactly why every figure carries the time it was taken.
- It is the right place to check a claim, and the wrong place to keep a shortlist.
The two are complements, not competitors. Use the page to research and the sheet to decide; the failure mode of each is the strength of the other.
Six properties compared
Read the last row first if you only read one: it is the row that decides which tool to reach for.
| Property | Published finds page | Your own spreadsheet |
|---|---|---|
| Who can edit a row | Nobody | You |
| What happens when a price goes stale | The reading date remains visible | The old figure sits there looking current |
| Fields available | Fixed and consistent across every row | Whatever you happened to type |
| Scope | Thousands of recorded rows | Dozens, realistically |
| Sorting and filtering | Built in, on the fields that exist | Whatever you build yourself |
| Best use | Verifying a claim and finding candidates | Deciding, budgeting and keeping notes |
A spreadsheet that grows past a few dozen rows stops being a decision tool and becomes an unmaintained database. That is the moment to move research to a reference and keep only the shortlist in the sheet.
The working arrangement in four numbers
A concrete split that takes about twenty minutes to set up and removes the two failure modes above.
1Reference to research from
the published catalogue, read on a date you can see
1Sheet you own
holding only rows you are actually deciding between
8Columns to carry across
name, source, price, price date, category, size, weight, material
3Rows that justify a sheet
below three, the comparison is in your head and the sheet is overhead
The third number is the printable checklist from the spreadsheet page: carry all eight fields into your own sheet, and a shortlist becomes comparable rather than merely collected.
Tool questions
Four answers about which tool to use when.
Is a published list more trustworthy than my own sheet?
Not more trustworthy — more stable. Your sheet holds your judgement and can be edited; a published page holds a reading with a date and cannot be quietly changed. Trust the sheet for your opinion and the page for the record.
Why not just copy the whole catalogue into a sheet?
Because it would immediately go stale, and a stale copy looks identical to a current one. That is precisely the failure mode a published page avoids by stamping every read with a time.
Can I export the index to a spreadsheet?
The catalogue is read from a public JSON API, so the data is not locked away. What we do not offer is a download button, because a file on your disk has no reading date attached to it.
Which should I open first?
The page. Research broadens your options; the sheet narrows them. Doing it the other way round means building a spreadsheet around a decision you have not made yet.
Research here, decide in your own sheet
The index holds 11,414 recorded listings with reading dates attached — enough to build a shortlist, and stable enough to check one a month later.