What is an alternative to Excel for tracking applications?

Feature comparison

As of 4 September 2026. "not stated" means it could not be read on their own site — not "does not exist". Our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow, not from marketing copy.

Pricing side by side

As of 4 September 2026. "not stated" means it could not be read on their own site — not "does not exist". Our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow, not from marketing copy.

What Excel does better, and it is a real list

The file is yours. It sits on your own machine, it opens in ten years, and no provider gets to decide whether the free tier still exists next spring. For a list that has to survive a control period and may be produced in a dispute, that is not a minor advantage — it is the main one. A tracking product that changes its terms takes your evidence with it; a spreadsheet on a disk never does.

It also calculates. How many applications went out this month, how many have had no reply after four weeks, what share of the adverts that went through a large applicant system ever answered at all — three formulas and you have numbers about your own search that no finished product hands you in that shape. The same flexibility lets you add whatever column your case needs: commute time, language requirement, permit question, the name of the person who said they would call back.

And it prints. Being able to slide a sheet of paper across the desk at an RAV meeting beats reading numbers off a phone. The cost of all this is nothing: Microsoft's Swiss page says Excel on the web is free to use for one person with 5 GB of storage, and the paid tiers exist for the desktop apps, not for twenty rows of job applications. Anyone telling you a spreadsheet is too expensive or too technical for this job is arguing against a problem you do not have.

In Switzerland the list has a prescribed shape

This is where international advice about job-hunt trackers stops being relevant. If you are registered with an RAV, you are not keeping a private overview; you are producing a record. The arbeit.swiss form «Nachweis der persönlichen Arbeitsbemühungen» shows what that record contains: the date of the application, company and address, contact person with telephone number, the job title, whether the RAV assigned the vacancy, full-time or part-time as a percentage, how you applied, the outcome, and the reason if the answer was no — plus your name and the month the sheet covers.

The digital route runs through Job-Room. Under eServices for jobseekers, arbeit.swiss lists «Efforts to find work», «Incapacity to work» and «Documents for jobseeking», and its forms page recommends the eServices over paper because they guarantee protected and confidential transmission. That is the channel where efforts count. Excel does not submit anything, and neither do we.

How many applications you owe each month is agreed individually with your RAV, and practice differs from canton to canton — arbeit.swiss points you to your own office for personal advice. The consequence for the tooling question is the same everywhere: your overview is useful when it transfers into those fields without a second round of work. Verify the specifics with your RAV rather than with any tool's marketing page, including ours.

Where the spreadsheet actually breaks

A spreadsheet is not bad at storing. It is bad at the moment of entry. Every row is typed out of an advert that happens to be open, and the timing is unhelpful: you have just sent an application, you are finished, and now you are asked to copy eight fields into a second window. That is where the gaps appear that cannot be closed a month later — the employer is there, the exact job title is not, the workload is missing, the contact person was never captured at all.

The second break is the link, which feels like the best possible entry because it contains everything, and is the only entry that expires by itself. Vacancies get filled and disappear: across our index the median open advert is 15 to 41 days old depending on the field, longest in construction, shortest in engineering roles. When your counsellor asks in month three, or when you want to remember what the advert promised before an interview, the URL lands on a generic careers page or on nothing.

The rule that follows applies to every tool, ours included: write the facts out instead of pointing at them. Job title verbatim, employer with location, date, how you applied, and for the outcome not just «rejected» but the reason given. Save the advert as a PDF if you want the wording — the official form even provides a field for attachments. Then the link is a convenience rather than the evidence.

What our application list does, and what it does not

Our answer to the typing problem is to remove it. The list lives inside the same job search, so a vacancy you save from the feed is already there afterwards, carrying job title, employer, location, link and date without a single keystroke. One checkbox turns a saved advert into an application, the date can be clicked and corrected if you actually sent it two days later, and entries are grouped by day, so «what did I do this week» is a glance rather than a reconstruction.

Anything that did not come from here goes in by hand: job title, company, location, date, the address of the posting, and a field for the contact person with name, email and phone. That covers the application you made through another board, a newspaper advert or a conversation. All of it sits in the free tier — an account with an email address is enough, and no card is asked for.

Now the limits, because they decide the choice. There is no export and no print view, so the list cannot be submitted as a file or carried to an appointment on paper. There are no columns for workload, application method and rejection reason, the three the official record wants. For adverts that came from LinkedIn we do not display a link back to the posting. And it needs an account and a connection, which a file on your laptop does not. If you need something to hand over, you still need a spreadsheet or the form.

Google Sheets, dedicated trackers, and paper

Google Sheets is the obvious substitute and structurally the same thing — Google states that anyone with a Google account can create documents in Sheets. What you gain is sharing and phone access; what you give up is the file sitting on your own disk. For showing a list to a counsellor without emailing it, it is the better of the two spreadsheets.

Then there are dedicated application trackers: Notion templates and products such as Teal or Huntr. They are built around the American hiring funnel and know nothing about the Swiss proof of job-search efforts or about Job-Room. What each costs and does belongs on its own comparison page rather than in a sentence here — but the test for a Swiss control period is not the feature list, it is whether the fields transfer into the official record.

And the underrated option is paper. The official form is a PDF you can fill in or print, and if you send four applications a month and have one interview a week, a sheet in a folder loses you nothing while saving you every login. Software earns its place at the point where you start losing track of replies, not before.

Which alternative suits whom

Registered with an RAV: the record goes through the Job-Room eService or the form, because that is the only place your efforts count. Everything else — Excel, us, a notebook — is the working list beside it, the one holding follow-ups, contact people and interview dates. Two lists is not duplication here; it is a division of labour, and any tool claiming to replace the official channel is selling you a risk.

Applying regularly to Swiss adverts you find online, and not registered: use us. The argument is narrow and it is the only one that matters — the row is created when you save the job, because the advert is already here. Over months at two applications a week, that is the difference between a list you keep and a list you meant to keep.

Wanting a file you own, that calculates and prints: stay with Excel, or move to Google Sheets, and lay the columns out to match the official form rather than by instinct. And if your search is a handful of applications, use paper. The best tool for this question is not the one with the most features; it is the one where the row actually gets written after you press send.