--- title: "The GLP-1 Tracking Spreadsheet: Eight Fields That Matter | Peptyn" description: "The eight columns worth keeping in a GLP-1 tracker spreadsheet, what each one answers months later, and where a spreadsheet stops being the right tool." canonical: "https://peptyn.orlyn.ai/articles/glp1-tracker-spreadsheet" last-updated: "2026-08-16" --- # The GLP-1 Tracking Spreadsheet: Eight Fields That Matter *The eight columns worth keeping in a GLP-1 tracker spreadsheet, what each one answers months later, and where a spreadsheet stops being the right tool.* Educational · Not medical advice · 18+ You don't need to do the math. You need to write it down. Published 15 August 2026 · 8 min read · 6 sources This is a guide to what belongs in a GLP-1 tracker spreadsheet and, just as importantly, what doesn't. It is not a dosing guide. It will not tell you what to inject or how much, and you should be suspicious of any tracking template that does, because the moment a spreadsheet starts computing a dose for you it has stopped being a record and started being advice. A log has one job: to turn what you did into something you can look up instead of something you have to remember. Most tracking spreadsheets fail at that job in one of two directions. Either they sprawl into forty columns and stop getting filled in by week three, or they collapse to two columns and answer nothing when your prescriber asks a real question. Here are the eight fields that earn their place. ## 1. The date The date is the field everything else hangs off, and it is the only one worth filling in before the injection rather than after. Write the date the moment you know it. If on Sunday you know the injection is happening Monday, put Monday's row in on Sunday. The habit matters because it makes absence visible: when you look back at the month, a gap shows up as an empty row you already created, not as a memory you have to reconstruct. Reconstructed logs are the ones that turn out to be wrong. The date is also what makes the rest of the sheet answerable. Three questions come up over and over in a protocol, and all three are date questions: when was the last one, what was the actual interval, and what did the last three months really look like. ## 2. The time Recording the time is what converts a list of dates into a set of intervals. Hour precision is plenty. "Saturday morning" or "Tue 9am" is enough resolution to answer the question that actually gets asked, which is not "what time did you inject" but "how long was it between the last two." The difference between a Saturday morning injection and the following Saturday evening is roughly half a day, and if you are estimating from memory rather than reading it off a log, that is exactly the kind of detail that gets rounded away. Semaglutide products such as Ozempic and Wegovy are labeled for once-weekly use.[1][2] Whether your own schedule held to that is a question about your record, not about the label, and the time column is the only place the answer lives. ## 3. The compound Write the exact name printed on what you are injecting. Straightforward with a brand pen: the name is on the label. Less so with a compounded preparation, where the vial may not say the word you use in conversation. It might read "semaglutide" with a salt form appended, or carry a pharmacy's own product name. Write what the label says, not the shorthand. This matters at the moment something changes. If your prescriber moves you to a different product, or a supply interruption puts a different label in your hand, the compound column is what connects the two stretches of your log into one continuous record instead of two disconnected ones. If you are logging more than one compound, this field is also the only thing that lets you tell later which record belongs to which. ## 4. The label dose This is the field that separates a tracking sheet from a dosing calculator, and it is the one people most often get wrong. **Write down what the label says. Not what you worked out, not what you intended, not what you think you are supposed to be taking.** A strength is already printed on the packaging, and how it is expressed varies by product. Ozempic pens state a total amount in a total volume, with the concentration per mL alongside it.[1] Wegovy states an amount per injection volume.[2] Those are two different conventions, which is exactly why copying the line off the label beats paraphrasing it from memory. Go and read the numbers off your own packaging rather than off an article. This is a transcription field, not a decision field. Nothing is being calculated. You are copying data that already exists onto a line with a date next to it. The reason is practical: months later, the only way to know whether you were recording the same thing throughout is to compare the strings you wrote down. If a refill arrives expressed differently, or a compounded vial comes back at a different concentration, the column changes and you can see it. That is a change memory does not reliably catch. If you find yourself wanting a column that multiplies two other columns together, that is the point at which you are no longer keeping a log. Keep the arithmetic out of the sheet and take the question to your prescriber. ## 5. The injection site Abdomen, thigh, upper arm, buttock. One word is enough. The labeling for semaglutide directs using a different site for each injection.[3] A written record is what tells you whether you actually did. Rotation is hard to audit from memory because there is nothing to remember: no single injection stands out, so the pattern only becomes visible when the entries are lined up. There is a documented reason clinicians care about this, though the strongest evidence comes from insulin therapy rather than GLP-1 medicines. Lipohypertrophy, a lump of thickened fatty tissue that can form under the skin at injection sites, has been studied extensively in people using insulin, and failure to rotate sites is among the strongest predictors of it.[4] That research is about insulin and should not be read as a finding about GLP-1 products. What carries across is the ordinary point that a site column costs you one word per entry and is the only injection-site history you will ever have. If an area starts to feel different, tender or firm or altered in sensation, that is a question for your prescriber, and a site log is what turns "I think I've been using that spot a lot" into a list of dates. ## 6. The batch or lot number Every vial and pen carries a batch or lot number on the label. It is usually small and easy to skip. Write it anyway. It is inert information right up until it isn't. FDA's guidance to consumers on drug recalls is explicit about what to do when you hear about one: "check the lot number on the label of your medicine to see if it matches the lot number of the recalled medicine in the notification."[5] That check is trivial if you wrote the number down and impossible if the carton went into the recycling three weeks ago. Two caveats worth holding onto. FDA notes that not all recalls are publicly announced, and its advice for questions about your medicine is to talk to your doctor or pharmacist.[5] A lot column does not replace that conversation. It makes the conversation faster, because you can answer the first question you will be asked. The lot number is also what makes a safety report useful. MedWatch is FDA's safety reporting program for medical products, open to patients and consumers as well as clinicians.[6] A report that includes the specific lot is more informative than one that doesn't. ## 7. How you felt What did you notice after this one? Energy, nausea, nothing at all, something else. This is not a symptom questionnaire and you do not need clinical vocabulary. "Queasy most of Monday," "normal," "no appetite," "slept badly" is the right register. Write what you noticed and roughly when. The value shows up in aggregate, and only to someone reading several weeks at once. A prescriber looking across a run of entries can see whether something appears after every injection or only some, whether it clusters at a particular point in the interval, and whether it changed when something else in the log changed. None of that is visible in any single entry, and none of it survives being recalled from memory in an appointment. The failure mode here is perfectionism. Waiting for the right word produces a blank cell, and a blank cell is indistinguishable from a day you felt fine. "Off" beats nothing. ## 8. The free-text note The last column has no schema. It is for the things no preset field anticipated. Injected at an unusual time, or later than planned. Travel, a skipped meal, a bad night, alcohol, a stressful week. Bruising at the site, a bent needle, a pen that felt different going in. A note that you changed nothing at all, which is worth recording on the weeks it's true. This column is where the exceptions live, and exceptions are disproportionately what you end up needing. When something in the log looks strange six weeks later, the explanation is almost never in the structured fields. It is in whatever you scribbled that day and forgot. ## When a spreadsheet works, and when it stops A spreadsheet is a good answer when you want total control of the format, or when you want a static record you can print and fill in by hand. Those are real reasons and a sheet does them well. It runs into three limits. **You are not at a keyboard when you inject.** Injections happen at home, at work, in a hotel room. Filling in a spreadsheet from a phone means opening a document, finding the row, and typing into a cell built for a mouse. What tends to happen instead is a batch of entries reconstructed days later, and a reconstructed entry is a worse record than one made at the time. That is a friction problem, and friction is what decides whether a log survives past month two. **You cannot query it standing at a counter.** A pharmacist or a nurse asks when you last injected. If the file is on a laptop at home, you are estimating out loud. This is the specific moment a tracker on your phone, searchable by date or compound, does something a spreadsheet structurally cannot. **Sharing is manual every time.** A prescriber wants the last three months. Exporting and emailing a sheet works, but there is no built-in way to produce a timeline, surface a pattern, or hand over one slice of the record without reformatting it by hand. Do that quarterly and it becomes the reason the log quietly stops. None of these are arguments that the spreadsheet was wrong. They are the limits of a document built for a desk, applied to something that happens away from one. If your sheet is getting filled in reliably, it is working, and that is the only test that matters. ## References 1. OZEMPIC (semaglutide) injection, for subcutaneous use: Prescribing Information. DailyMed, U.S. National Library of Medicine. 2. WEGOVY (semaglutide) injection: Prescribing Information. DailyMed, U.S. National Library of Medicine. 3. Semaglutide Injection. MedlinePlus Drug Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine. 4. Gentile S, et al. Insulin-Related Lipohypertrophy: Lipogenic Action or Tissue Trauma? *Front Endocrinol*. 2018. 5. Understanding Drug Recalls: What to Know and What to Do. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. 6. MedWatch: The FDA Safety Information and Adverse Event Reporting Program. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. ## Keep reading - [Did I already take my shot?](https://peptyn.orlyn.ai/articles/did-i-already-take-my-shot) Why the memory fails for everyone, what the poison-centre data actually shows, and which checks do not hold up. - [Your lot number, and how to check it](https://peptyn.orlyn.ai/articles/glp1-recall-lot-number) Where the code lives on a pen, vial and carton, how to search FDA enforcement records, and which channel takes which report. - [The 28-day rule, and when it applies](https://peptyn.orlyn.ai/articles/28-day-rule-glp1-vial) Where the number comes from in USP 797, why most GLP-1 labels set a different one, and which date only you can record. This article is educational. It does not recommend doses, schedules, or products, and it is not medical advice. Every factual claim above is linked to its source. Questions about your own protocol belong with the prescriber who wrote it. --- Source: