What's inside the FreeCRiM workbook - companies, contacts, deals and the pipeline

Open a FreeCRiM workbook in Excel and you see an ordinary spreadsheet with a header row, filters and dropdowns you did not have to set up - because FreeCRiM already did, before you typed a single row.

The four data sheets

  • Companies - name, website domain, industry, status (a dropdown: Prospect, Customer, Partner, Former, Do Not Contact) and contact details.
  • Contacts - name, email, job title, the one company they belong to, and a status dropdown of their own.
  • Deals - name, the one company and primary contact it belongs to, a stage drawn from your pipeline, amount, and a weighted-amount formula.
  • Activities - calls, emails, meetings and tasks, each optionally linked to a contact, company or deal, with a due date and a status of Open, Done or Cancelled.

Every row's first column is an id FreeCRiM assigns - COM-00001, CON-00001, DEA-00001, ACT-00001 - so a link to a contact keeps pointing at that contact even if the sheet gets re-sorted.

The Stages sheet and the Pipeline summary

Deals move through stages you control on their own sheet - the shipped set is Lead, Qualified, Proposal, Negotiation, Won and Lost, each with an order and a probability percentage, but you can reorder, rename or add to it and the Deals sheet's dropdown follows immediately.

The Pipeline sheet reads that structure back as a summary: one row per stage, with a deal count, a total value and a probability-weighted value, all as live formulas over the Deals sheet. FreeCRiM never writes into it - it is yours to read, chart or copy into another sheet.

Built to survive being opened in Excel

Every dropdown, every conditional format (an overdue activity highlighted in red, a stale deal flagged after 30 days) and every frozen header is authored into the file when it is created, because the Microsoft Graph API FreeCRiM writes through afterwards can append and update rows but cannot add that formatting to a file that already exists. That is what makes it safe to open the workbook directly: everything you see there was built to be read and edited by a person, not just by the app.

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Frequently asked questions

Do I have to use the app to see my pipeline?
No. The Pipeline sheet is formulas only - deal counts, total value and weighted value by stage - so it updates the moment you edit a row in Excel, with FreeCRiM closed.
Can I add my own column?
Yes. FreeCRiM never removes or overwrites a column it did not create; add whatever you need and it stays exactly where you put it.
Can I change the deal stages or add new ones?
Yes. The Stage dropdown on the Deals sheet reads from a Stages sheet you can edit directly - reorder, rename or add a stage and the dropdown follows.

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