Well, every project is different, to say nothing of every writer being different! But yes, I do find a spreadsheet useful for outlining. Especially so when I have a project with a lot of different strands in it that I want to sort of braid together through the story.
I’ve been talking with a couple of writer friends lately about outlining. We’re at a similar level of writing skill, and we seem to all be butting up against the need to develop our outlining skills to keep moving forward. At some point I think most of us discover that we need more sophisticated ways of organizing, conceptualizing and navigating around in our stories.
I told them Ivy is the person to talk to about that.