I second Vickie's recommendation; after trying MS-Word (still useful for some things, but not for things like bloom time), I now use Excel for tracking bloom time, last pot or division/replant date, and short notes (like: RUST!). I use different pages to track: tets, dips, tet seedlings, dip seedlings, new seedlings (in the seedling beds) and so on. (I should really put a column in there for fertilizing.
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I have also found Excel useful for notes on cultivars whose heritage (and rust susceptibility) I want to trace or estimate.
MS-Word does have its uses though. For each plant, I have a page (sometimes two) in a file (the files are done alphabetically, so all "A", "B", "C" etc cultivars are in the same file). After the (bolded and much larger font) name/title, I use the hybridizer's bloom image (until I can replace it with my own), followed by the pertinent registration stats (hybridizer/year, tet/dip, foliage, bloom and scape size, budcount and branching, special features such as EMO/CMO fragrance, etc).
Beneath that is the AHS brief color description, and below that I will (if it can be found) often copy the hybridizer hype (their paragraph(s) describing the plant).
Beneath THAT are three or four lines: Parentage, Source (where I got the plant from), Location (where it is in my garden), and Awards.
Finally (this is where the second page may come in) I may have to add some notes of my own (more than there is room for in Excel or on the first MS-Word page for the plant). This can be on bloom behavior (colors, cold night/day opening issues, consistency, substance, texture), pest or disease susceptibility, breeding performance, garden performance/value, whatever. If I give the plant away, I may note who I gave it to.
I decided at some point not to remove the MS-Word file entries if a plant is removed from the garden, or goes MIA, or dies. I will change the text color to RED (which indicates that the plant is no longer in my garden), and remove extra or detailed data that I no longer need (the hybridizer hype and so on), and I will add a short note as to what happened or why I punted the plant. (Doing this keeps that cultivar data limited to one page, but it is valuable to look at if I have second thoughts about the plant, or if I had forgotten I even had the plant at one time.)
You can see that all of that DETAILED information is too much for a spreadsheet, so MS-Word does have its uses.
But if you want an overview of what is blooming in your garden at any point in the season, or a quick trait comparison between different daylilies, or to see what needs division or fertilizing, then yes, Excel is your friend! (I recently found out that I could have it order the plant entries based on column data such as bloom size or height! Heaven!)
If you keep a separate page for new garden purchases for the year, you can use the Autosum feature to add up your total expenditures! (Then again, maybe that is information that you don't want to know...
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You may also find it useful to insert a 1" .jpg image of the daylily in the first or second column of the Excel entry. (You will end up with something like 5 lines per entry to fit that 1" image in there, and you may not be able to make use of the sort function at that point, but I have found adding that small image useful when recording seedling field notes so it is all good.)
Good luck to you, whatever you decide to do!
