Originally Posted by
kaputt
Add me as a vote for excel spreadsheet. Several times I thought about going with LogBook Pro or one of the competitors but I always balked at the price and the fact that you never know how long those companies may last. I know LogBook Pro has been around a long time now, but it's still impossible to know if they'll still be there 30 years from now.
There are a couple of templates floating around out there you can use, but I ultimately just made my own and it works great.
I also still paper log as well. Frankly I enjoy the personal touch of logging everything in writing and I hope it is something my kids or grandkids will find interesting in the future. I know I cherish my grandfathers hand written log books. Plus, I figure you can never have too many back ups if you are a professional pilot. I not only have my paper logs, I have my electronic log book saved to my laptop, to a cloud, and to an external hard drive.
Bottom line, save your money and make your own electronic log and also keep doing paper.
I'd recommend LBP for the upwardly mobile since it has a lot of tools for airline apps data formats, etc. You can of course do that all yourself if you have serious excel kung fu, but that's not for everyone and you wouldn't want it to slice and dice your time wrong.
Once you're at your career-destination employer, yeah a spreadsheet is just fine... assuming you even bother to log it.