Brad,
Everyone is going to have their way of doing things. When I took over, I saw a lot of mechanical requirements to make a monthly newsletter and keep up with PT Points and the administration of the club. While a spreadsheet works fine as a stand-alone record, it does not automatically post to a newsletter. On the other hand, a database, which includes PT Points and PT Events can be queried to produce both a newsletter and a spreadsheet. It can also be queried to produce reports which can be used to verify the accuracy of the records. Additionally, having a master database of membership (present and past) provided an automated way to include New Member and Five Year Member processes. Not to mention that it also produces an ability to make radius reports for marketing and fly-in promotion. I did spend considerable time geo-coding our membership to allow such reports.
When I resigned, the PT Points were essentially up to date in the database. I did not take the database with me. It is a club database and resides on the club servers. As of my resignation, I asked Mark G. to eliminate my access to the data. I have not accessed the data since my resignation. All one needs to do to extract any information is to query the database.
While I think that having the current PT Point standings present on the web site is a great idea, I did not have time to maintain such and still complete the other ongoing activities I was performing for the club. The PT Points have no award for second or third place. I think your characterization of the top five appearing in the newsletter is a little misleading. True, during the early part of the year there was not always much more than five. In fact, sometimes there was nothing to publish except the prior years standings until about March or April. But a review of some of the BACFire issues will show that as time moved on, I included a longer list.
Chris told me when I took over that I was under no obligation to do things his way. I thought that his monthly newsletter was a great idea and endeavored to continue that. I also continued his implementation of the five year pins and letters to new members. I did choose to produce those processes and the newsletter in a manner which I felt was less time consuming.
I think that spreadsheets make fine ledgers. However, they are not great repositories of data. Particularly data which ultimately might be better expressed in other ways. The membership data, event data, PT point data are all data. I used a database. In fact, this website is just a series of tables of data.
Everyone needs to give the new leadership time to decide and implement how they want to run the club.