Moving Your Pool Off a Spreadsheet Without Losing History

Start with the numbered key

Most paper pools print a numbered list of teams each week and collect sheets where players circle numbers. That key is the most important artifact you have — without it, a sheet full of numbers is meaningless. Before importing, make sure every week's key is recorded as number-to-team, exactly as it was printed at the time. Keys change week to week; a single key applied to the whole season will silently scramble results.

Import week by week, and verify one player

Import a single week first and check one player's row against the original sheet, pick for pick. If that matches, the mapping is right and the rest of the season will follow. If you import everything at once and the numbers were off by one, you'll spend longer unwinding it than you saved.

Expect a handful of unreadable or ambiguous entries in any paper-sourced week. Record them as issues to resolve rather than guessing — a wrong pick recorded as fact will surface as an argument later.

Names change; people don't

The same player will appear as 'Raul M', 'R. Martinez' and 'RG' across three seasons. Merge those entries into one person rather than leaving duplicates in the standings, and make sure the merge moves their picks rather than deleting them. Where both entries picked the same game, keep the surviving entry's pick and note the collision.

Set a rule going forward: display names can change, but the underlying player record stays, so history follows the person.

Tell your players what changed

Send one message before the first online week covering three things: the new deadline, where to see standings, and the fact that their previous results are already in. Include a direct link. Migrations fail on communication far more often than on data.

Keep the spreadsheet around read-only for a season. It costs nothing and settles any dispute about whether the import was faithful.