The problem with one chapter number
Ask a manhwa reader where they are in a series and you get two answers, not one. There is the chapter they last read. There is also the chapter that exists — published weeks or months ago in Korean or Chinese, sitting there while the official English release works its way toward it.
A tracker with a single chapter field stores the first number and throws the second away. So the questions that actually come up have nowhere to live. How much can I read tonight? How much is banked that I can’t touch yet? Is the wait getting shorter or longer? Is this series on a season break, or did it quietly end six months ago and nobody told me?
This workbook stores three numbers per series instead of one, and every one of those questions falls out of the distance between them.
The three positions
Raw Latest is the most recent chapter published in the original language. Eng Latest is the most recent chapter available in whatever English release you actually follow. I’m On is where you stopped.
From those, without you doing anything:
- Readable Left — what you can read today.
- Untranslated — what exists that you cannot. This is the column no single-number tracker can produce, because it collapsed the two publication counts into one before you ever opened it.
- Hrs to Read — the readable backlog in your own minutes per chapter, so a forty-chapter webcomic and a four-volume print run can finally be compared.
- Where You Stand — a verdict, not a label you maintain by hand. Where you have set a status yourself — dropped, paused, finished, not started — it honors that; everywhere else the three numbers decide the band. “Caught up to raws” and “At the translation wall” are separate bands on purpose: being level with everything that exists is a different feeling from being level with the translation while the original runs ahead of you.
Is English catching up, or losing ground?
Give each series its two release rates — how fast the raws ship, how fast English does — and the workbook subtracts them.
If English is gaining, Gap Trend gives you a week: Closing — parity in 62 wk. If it is level, it says so. And if English is shipping slower than the original, it refuses to invent a comforting number and tells you the truth instead: Widening by 2/wk. That is not a wait to sit out. That is a decision — go to the raws, find another translation, or let the series go — and it is worth making deliberately rather than by drifting away.
The Translation Gap tab ranks your whole roster three ways: the biggest untranslated buffers, the series where English is losing ground, and a Read Tonight list ordered shortest-first, so the top row is the one you could actually finish this evening.
A season break and an abandoned series look identical
Manhwa publishes in seasons. Silence is normal, right up until it isn’t, and there is often no announcement when a series stops for good — it simply never updates again. That is how series get lost: not by deciding to drop them, but by forgetting they existed.
Hiatus Watch counts the days since each series last updated and bands the answer — updating, a break between arcs, between seasons, or quiet long enough that it is worth going to check whether it ended. An announced return date beats any amount of day-counting, because a date is a date. Once a month, down the list, is the whole habit.
Where the story came from
Plenty of manhwa and manhua adapt a web novel, and that turns out to be computable. Tell the workbook how long the novel is and which of its chapters the comic has reached, and Novel Origin works out how densely the adaptation is spending its source — then estimates the runway: roughly how many more chapters of comic the existing novel can still supply.
Two series with the same amount of novel banked can have wildly different runways, and thin runway is one reason an adaptation you love can stall.
Your own position in the novel, and whether you meant to be there, give you a spoiler verdict. It takes account of intent as well as position — because being forty novel chapters ahead is a triumph if you went looking, and a disaster if you did not.
The Dashboard, the Reading Log and To Read
The Dashboard is the whole catalog in one screen: readable hours, untranslated chapters, series that have gone quiet, spoiler risks, and ranked tables for the biggest translation walls, the longest silences and the deepest source-novel runway.
The Reading Log holds the sessions you actually read. My Pace is not a number you type — it is read back from the last 28 days of that log, so it reflects how you have been reading lately rather than how you think you read.
To Read answers a different question: are there enough chapters banked yet to be worth starting? A series three chapters in and a series two hundred chapters in are not the same decision, and the tab computes a verdict instead of leaving it to a hunch.
Excel and Google Sheets, not one converted into the other
The download includes the .xlsx and a clickable link to a native Google Sheet. Choose “Make a copy” and you get your own private copy in your Drive with every dropdown, color and calculation already working — a real Sheet, not an import of a spreadsheet built for something else.
It also works in LibreOffice. It is one file, and it is yours.
Own it, don’t rent it
A blank spreadsheet gives you one chapter number per series and leaves every question you actually have unanswered. A subscription app gives you someone else’s categories, a monthly fee, and a reading list that lives on someone else’s terms — right up until the app shuts down, or the series you were halfway through quietly disappears from its catalog.
This sits between them: nine connected tabs and a real computed engine, in a file with no account attached to it and nothing that expires. Add a column. Delete a tab. Rebuild the dashboard around the two numbers you care about. Nobody can change it out from under you.
Honest limits
It is a workbook, not a scraper. It cannot fetch chapter counts — you type them when you notice them, which is often once a week, while you are waiting for the next chapter anyway. Runway is an estimate, and the guide says so plainly. The Platform Guide describes how platforms charge in general and quotes no prices, because platform terms change.
Every series, novel and platform figure in the worked example is fictional, invented to show the calculations in use. Platform, publisher and app names belong to their owners; this product is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.
There is a free one-tab starter version if you would rather try the idea before paying for the workbook — it holds the same three numbers and gives the same verdict, with room for forty series instead of two hundred.
