Free Portsmouth Yardstick scoring spreadsheet template
Most clubs start out scoring races on a spreadsheet, and there's nothing wrong with that: it's free, everyone already has it, and for a small fleet it works. This is a ready-made version so you don't have to build the corrected-time and series-points formulas, or type out the national number list, yourself.
What's in it
- PY Numbers 2026: the full current national Portsmouth Number list, one row per class. This is the live source every race tab reads from, not a one-off figure buried in a formula: change a number here and every race using that class updates.
- Race 1 to Race 8: eight ready-to-use race tabs, each with a date field at the top and a class dropdown sourced straight from the PY Numbers 2026 tab, so the Portsmouth Number fills in on its own. Enter sail number and elapsed time and corrected time and place are calculated with the standard PY corrected-time formula: elapsed time × 1000 ÷ PN.
- Series Points: list each boat's sail number once and its place in every race tab is pulled in automatically, matched by sail number, so there's nothing to copy by hand as the season progresses. A single cell sets how many of each sailor's worst results to discard, so you can leave it at zero early in the season and raise it later. See the discards guide for how discard counts usually scale with series length.
- Read Me: how to use every sheet, in one place.
The first race tab ships with five example boats so you can see every formula working before you clear them and enter your own fleet.
Where a spreadsheet starts to hurt
It scales fine for a handful of races. The friction shows up over a season:
- Every new sailor is a row added by hand in the Series Points sheet, kept in sync with sail numbers used across up to eight race tabs.
- The national Portsmouth Number list changes every year, and keeping the PY Numbers 2026 tab current is a job that falls to whoever remembers to do it.
- Results only reach anyone once you've exported a file or shared it directly, so there's a lag between the last boat finishing and anyone finding out how they did.
- Finishes still have to be typed in from a written record, there's no way to capture them from a phone on the water.
None of that is a reason to avoid a spreadsheet for a small club night. It's just useful to know where the ceiling is before you hit it.
The next step, if you need it
Sailboat Racing does the same corrected-time and series-points arithmetic as this template, current Portsmouth Numbers included, but finishes are captured from a phone on the day, results are published to a public results page the moment a race ends, and the fleet, class list, and PY numbers all carry forward automatically from one season to the next. It's free to set up.
Set up your club on Sailboat Racing, free, with results online before the boats are back on their trailers.
Last updated: 2026-09-03