Drill core tracking: spreadsheet vs software

Before comparing tools, be clear about the job. A core tracking system has to answer five questions, continuously and for everyone at once: where is every hole right now (which stage — markup, logging, photography, cutting, sampling, dispatch); what changed today (metres drilled, stages finished, by whom); what should each person do next; where is work piling up; and, months later, what happened, exactly — the history a QA/QC review or JORC sign-off will ask for.

The hard part isn't storing this — a sheet of paper can store it. The hard part is that the answers change hourly, the people updating them are standing at a saw or a logging bench with dirty hands, and the people reading them are spread between the yard, the rig and an office 600 km away.

Spreadsheets earn their popularity. They cost nothing, need no approval or onboarding, bend to whatever columns your program cares about, and beat the whiteboard on the thing that matters most: the record survives. A completed hole is a row, not an erased column. For a one-rig program with a small crew and one person keeping the sheet, this is genuinely a workable system — if that's you, a disciplined spreadsheet may be all you need for now.

The problems arrive with scale, and they're structural rather than fixable with effort:

• One writer at a time. Shared drives lock the file; copies fork. Two geos updating after a swing produces two versions of the truth, and someone spends Friday reconciling them.
• It lives where the work isn't. Nobody updates a workbook standing at the saw with wet gloves. So updates batch up to the evening, and batch updates are where metres get transposed and ticks land on the wrong hole.
• Cells have no memory. Overtype 163.0 with 172.4 and the old value, the author and the timestamp are gone. When a QA/QC query asks why a depth changed, the sheet shrugs. Change-history features exist, but nobody audits a core program from a revision log.
• It doesn't tell anyone anything. A formula can't tap the sampler on the shoulder when cutting finishes. Handoffs still travel by Teams message, smoko conversation or luck — the sheet records the flow, it doesn't drive it.
• Analysis is homework. Backlog per stage and cycle times are all derivable from a well-kept sheet — by whoever has the pivot-table skills and a spare evening. In practice the analysis happens once, for a monthly report, instead of continuously when it could change decisions.

Dedicated core tracking software exists to remove exactly those structural limits. The whole crew writes to one live board at the same time, from phones in the yard, so the record is updated at the moment of work rather than reconstructed at shift end. History accumulates as a by-product — every change keeps who, when, and the value before and after, which is the audit trail your QA/QC and JORC defensibility actually need. Stage handoffs become automatic: when logging closes out, the next stage lights up for whoever runs it. And because every event is timestamped, backlog per stage and cycle-time numbers are simply there, continuously, instead of being someone's pivot-table homework.

An honest comparison lists the costs too. Software is a subscription, not free. It's a change the crew has to adopt — a tool that's slower than a whiteboard marker in the yard will be ignored, so trial it in the yard, on the phones it will really run on, before committing. And it's another account and another vendor. Those costs are real; they're just small and fixed, while the spreadsheet's costs are hidden and grow with every rig, every crew member and every thousand metres.

Stay on the spreadsheet if one person can genuinely own it: one rig, a small crew mostly on the same roster, and nobody off-site who needs the picture daily. Move to software when any of these become true:

• More than one person needs to write updates — second rig, split crews, back-to-back rosters.
• Someone off-site — an exploration manager, a JV partner, a client — asks for status more than about once a week.
• You've been surprised by a backlog — assays late, trays queued at the saw — that the sheet only explained afterwards.
• A QA/QC query or resource-reporting review has asked for history the sheet couldn't produce.
• The program is about to scale — a new drill program announcement is the classic moment yards fall behind.

One more honest note: software fixes the record, not the yard. If the saw is the bottleneck, tracking won't cut core faster — it will just tell you, in metres and days, that the saw is the bottleneck. That's worth paying for precisely because it turns arguments into decisions, but it's a visibility tool, not a magic one.