I checked out FanSoft's newest offering, CheatSheet Creator, today. While I was encouraged by the nice design (us web designers are suckers for pretty colors and such), I quickly realized that I'll probably never use this unless the interface is reworked into something that's far less of a pain in my ass. I'm actually wondering whether they've actually sat down and tried to use their own product to build a cheat sheet before.

The sales pitch:

CheatSheet Creator allows you to easily take notes and create fantasy football cheatsheets and reports, all via an online notebook. The days or [sic] creating draft notes and cheatsheet [sic] on MS Excel are over. The future of fantasy football draft preparation is here!

When you first sign up and log in, you're going to be confused as to what you're supposed to do. The site doesn't make any effort to help you get started. Eventually I figured out that I was supposed to click on Browse Players, which presented me with a list of all of the players in the NFL, each with a little red plus sign next to their name. At this point, your task is to go through and click on the red plus sign next to every single player you'd like on your cheat sheet. Plan on having 300 players on your cheat sheet? Then you'd better get your clickin' finger ready because it's going to do a lot of work. Seriously, who's going to do this? Can't we just assume that everyone wants Tom Brady on their list? I hunted around for an "add all" button, to no avail.

UPDATE: I found a way to add all of the top players for a given position. It's not where anyone would think to look for it, though - rather than putting it on the page where you add players, it's in the "Notebook" section, where your players go when you add them. And if you add one player, the "add all" option disappears.

Now once I've got all my players in there, I'd better be able to do some pretty awesome stuff with the data, at least more than I could do in Excel or Google Spreadsheet. Let's see...

• Can I move players around in my list by clicking and dragging, the way I can with the movies in my Netflix queue? Nope, I have to change the little numbers next to their names, which means my keyboard is involved in an action that should be handled by just my mouse.
• Can I divide my cheatsheet into tiers, since any experienced fantasy football player knows that tiers are the difference between a good cheatsheet and a useless one? Doesn't appear that way.
• Can I use my cheatsheet during a live draft, clicking on each name as it's picked to make it disappear? That'd be pretty cool, but no.

Here's how I manage my own cheat sheets. I find a set of player rankings in a table somewhere on the Web - it doesn't have to be all that good or recent since I'm going to be changing the heck out of it anyway. It just needs to be in an HTML table so Microsoft Word will know to turn it into a table when I paste it in. I then paste the table from Word into Excel, and voila - instant spreadsheet of fantasy football players. From there, I hack away, ranking, tiering, coloring, highlighting, adding notes and links, and so on. When it's time to do an online draft, I save a copy of the file, and then put my dual monitors to good use - spreadsheet on one screen, draft window and web browser (for last-minute info lookups) on the other. Every time a player is picked, I CTRL-F to find his name on my list and use the keyboard shortcut for strikethrough (CTRL-5) to cross him off. It works beautifully. If I'm doing an in-the-flesh draft, I can just print it out.

I get the sense that they were on the right track with this product, but then it got to be July and they decided to just package it up, release it before it was done, and wait until next season to make it truly useful. The good news is that it wouldn't be too terribly difficult to take what they have, add a little AJAX and some interface tweaks, and turn it into a pretty useful tool, one that people who aren't comfortable with Excel might find indispensable. Here's what I'd change:

• Address the issues in the bulleted list above.
• Simply pre-populate the Notebook with the top 250 players in your "CSC Rankings." Or all of them. Why not? And pre-rank them, don't just throw them in there alphabetically.
• Turn the Community feature into something other than a crippled little Facebook. Why would I use this? Who are these people and why do I care? I couldn't even find a way to view their cheatsheets, which is kind of amusing.
• Stop calling the cheatsheet the "Notebook." It's a cheatsheet. Just call it that. In no way does it resemble a notebook.
• Make the individual player pages more about the player than the team they're on. Matt Leinart's player page includes embedded Google News stories about the Arizona Cardinals. Why not stories about Matt Leinart?

Anyway, they're offering it free to the first 750 people who sign up, so if you're still interested, you better sign up soon. I'll give this another look in a month to see if they've improved it at all.