Originally Posted by
DiabloScott
Strava is really good at keeping data. That's one reason I thought they could limit how much they keep for free members to boost premium membership. Since I do pretty much the same few routes all the time, I used to write down my information from the bike computer/HRM and transfer it into a spreadsheet later. Strava does all that automatically and I can get it in whatever form I want. It would be another good premium feature to be able to download info in spreadsheet form so I can sort and make my own charts - Strava charts are not very useful - you can kind of copy and paste Strava data into Excel but it's real clunky.
And it's pretty easy to not use the features you don't want - I've never used the route planner, I only compare my times to people I'm following, etc.
I guess because I sit in a world of analytic data all day long (it's my jerb!) there are some things I look to as an escape from that. Bikes would be one of those things. I actually have a spreadsheet called "Stupid Stats for Fun" that I import all kinds of data sets into. Maybe one day if I record enough trips (I'm beginning my bike commute on Thursday. New bike arrives tomorrow) I'll load it up into that.
Good charts are easy to do and impossible to find. I've actually taken courses on visualizing quantitative data and the summary is "everything sucks." New Excel (2013+) has some better charting functions, but the defaults are still ugly as all get out.
Aside from my mileage and time, what I really like about these kinds of applications is maps. I dig maps so I guess my app selection will be based on that as a feature.