A trading spreadsheet usually starts with more columns than it ends with. There's one for the setup, one for a grade, one for how sure you were going in and one for a screenshot link. By week three the grade column is blank, the screenshot links stopped somewhere in week two, and you're typing Thursday's fills in on Sunday night from your broker's confirmations.
The typing is a pain, but the bigger problem is that a row only keeps the numbers. It has an entry, an exit and a dollar figure, the figure is green or red, and you never look at it again. It shows what the trade made, and nothing about how close it came to being a loss.
I took a practice trade in Market Replay on TSLA's Sep 30 open. I bought 100 shares at 347.51 on the 9:40 AM bar, with a stop at 345.80 and a target at 351.00, and the target filled at 10:25 AM for +$346 after fees. As a spreadsheet row, that's a clean winner. On the chart, the very next bar traded down to 345.95. That's $156 against me and 15 cents above the stop. The trade is public if you want to see the bar.
My own spreadsheet went the same way. The screenshot column lasted about a month, and the grade column didn't make it that far either.
Importing a sheet that looks nothing like a broker export
Spreadsheets are the hard case for any importer, because nobody's sheet looks like anyone else's. Mine had the entry and exit on the same row, a date in one column and bare times like 9:40 AM in two others, which is about as far from a broker export as a file gets.
The importer doesn't need your sheet in any particular layout. Save it as a CSV and drop it into the journal, and it looks at your header row, works out that each row is a whole trade, and makes a guess for every column: this one is the entry price, that one is the exit time, the one full of dates is the date.
The guesses are usually right, but check them anyway. Mix up price and quantity and nothing in the file looks broken, so your 100 shares at 347.51 come in as 347.51 shares at $100, and every number built on that trade is wrong. That's why nothing is saved until you've looked at a preview of the trades it found. Check the first few against your sheet, and if they match, import.
A demo account importing a four-trade sheet, then playing back the AMD trade on its chart.
Notes, grades and screenshot links don't import. You can add your setups as tags once the trades are in, and tags are easier to filter on anyway.
Review shows what the row left out
A spreadsheet can't show you the trade. Open any trade in the journal, click Review, and the chart starts a little before your entry and plays the trade forward, with each fill marked where it happened. The TSLA row says +$346. The review shows the 9:45 AM bar dropping to 345.95 first, before price turned and ran to the target.
If your sheet has a stop column and a target column, the import reads those too, and Review draws both as lines on the chart. If it doesn't, type them into the trade's Initial stop and Target fields. Once a trade has a stop, the journal works out its R, what it made or lost as a multiple of what you risked.
Tag each trade with its setup and you can filter the journal down to one tag and review those trades one after another. If you've been trading a setup for months on the feeling that it works, that's where you find out whether the numbers back it up.
A demo account tagging two trades as Breakout and filtering the journal down to them.
If a setup keeps winning with cents to spare, Redo in replay is how you test a change to it. TraderPier goes back to a few bars before your original entry. You're flat again with no open orders, and you place a new entry on the same bars without seeing what comes next. Do that across a dozen trades from the setup and you see whether the change does any better. Doing it on one trade proves nothing, because you already know how that trade ended.
Free stores 10,000 trades and charts the last 30 days
Everything above works on a free account. Free stores up to 10,000 trades and includes the equity curve, the calendar and expectancy (what you make per trade on average). The one limit is how far back the charts go. Free has the last 30 days of market data, so recent trades open in Review, while older trades still import and show up in your stats but won't open on a chart. You also get three replays a day, Redo in replay included.
Trader, the first paid plan, stores 100,000 trades, has a year of market data with no daily replay limit, and adds a Setups table that puts every tag's numbers side by side. There's more on Pricing, the trading journal and replacing your trading spreadsheet.
Once your trades are in, open a few of the winners you remember as easy and watch them in Review. If some came as close to the stop as the TSLA trade did, that's worth knowing before you size up on that setup.