Useful Tool: Flexcel’s Flowing Software

Last weekend I had an opportunity to use Flexcel, a new flowing software created by several high school debaters from Texas: Saran Chockan, Sriman Gaddam, Ronak Shah, and Sukhjit Singh. The app is in its infancy (released August 2018), but it’s extremely intuitive and the developers are rapidly improving it based on user feedback. It’s available for Windows and Mac. If the developers continue to expand and refine its functionality, Flexcel–like Verbatim and Dropbox before it–will quickly become an essential piece of technology for every debater.

The biggest question for me was how Flexcel stacks up against a macro-enabled Excel template. I’ve used roughly the same template from my junior year in high school through college policy debate and whenever I’m judging. There are a few clear advantages for Flexcel against its biggest competitor:

1. Easily customizable autocompletion. As a judge, this doesn’t matter a ton for me; I’m a pretty fast typist and I can take time after a speech or round to review what I abbreviated or hastily wrote mid-speech. But for a debater, a template that populates words for you means a cleaner flow, saving mental energy, and faster prep time. You can add or remove as many of these autocomplete shortcuts as you like. If I were debating, I would have a quick macro for common theory arguments (you could put fairness is a voter, competing interpretations, RVIs good/bad, presume aff, etc. right into your flow). If you read a common kritik, you might have an analytic perm block programmed in. All of your extensions could be programmed in. Why switch between several documents or worry about a speech doc when you can populate many of your most common arguments right in the flow itself?
2. Speech doc side-by-side. With Flexcel, you can copy several speech docs right into the program, so you don’t need to switch between flow and doc. This isn’t a huge problem, but there’s often lost time when debaters are moving from an overview to line-by-line, especially when flowing on a laptop. It also makes flowing and prep easier since opponent arguments are right next to your flow. It’s better for judges following along too.
3. Designed for debaters. Navigating tabs, adding space between rows. These shortcuts can be yours with a macro-enabled Excel template, but with Flexcel, they’re already built in. The rows are correctly spaced, and there are easy font formatting options. Almost everything you want in your flow template is a basic feature of Flexcel, and functionality has improved with each update.

Check out the Flexcel website for all the features and download links. I’m very excited about this project, and even if you don’t flow on a laptop normally (though you should), it’s certainly worth a try now.