Spreadsheet and Notion trading journal templates remain the most common starting point for gold traders, and for good reasons: the file is owned outright, works offline, depends on no third party, and can carry any custom column the trader invents. Building the columns also forces a decision about what is actually being measured, which is a useful exercise regardless of what tool is used afterwards.
The weakness is not features but attrition. Manual journals decay in a specific and damaging pattern, because entries are skipped on losing days when the data matters most, and levels typed from memory hours after the fact drift towards the version of events the trader prefers. Reaching a gold native view manually also means building lot to dollar conversion at one hundred ounces per lot, spread cost per round turn, UTC conversion, session buckets for London 07:00 to 16:00 and New York 12:00 to 21:00, and an economic calendar cross reference, then filling every one of those fields on the two hundredth trade.
The practical resolution is not to abandon the spreadsheet but to stop asking it to hold objective data. A MetaTrader 5 connection builds the factual record automatically, including historical gold trades taken before signing up, and exports back to comma separated values or JSON, leaving the sheet for reasoning, context and any bespoke metric a trader wants to keep for themselves.