An advanced showflow template pack, and how to run a show from it

Six showflows, one per shape of event, in a single Excel workbook: a keynote-led conference, a multi-room programme, an awards night, a hybrid show, a product launch and a town hall. Each is the same twenty-eight columns, so a producer who learns one has learned all six.

An INDEX sheet lists them. A CHANGE LOG sheet sits at the end and is shared by all six. Every template carries an example running order rather than an empty grid — the conference one starts at crew call and comms check, then final media and speaker check, then doors — because a blank template teaches nobody what a cue is.

Cue IDs run 0.10, 0.20, 0.30 rather than 1, 2, 3. That is deliberate and it is the oldest trick in the running order: when something has to go between two cues at eleven in the morning on show day, you need a number that fits between them without renumbering the sheet and invalidating every note the crew has already written on paper.

Download the advanced showflow template pack (XLSX). If you want something simpler to start with, the single-room and multi-room CSV templates are one flat table each and open anywhere.

Most showflows carry one clock: the time each item is meant to start. That clock is a plan, and it stops being true about twenty minutes into the show. This pack carries three.

Planned Start, Planned Duration and Planned End are what you agreed in the production meeting. Actual Start and Actual End are what you type in as the show runs. Forecast Start and Forecast End are what the remaining items will now happen at, given what has already happened.

The gap between planned and actual is Schedule Variance, and it is the number nobody has to hand when they need it. A keynote that runs six minutes long is not a problem in itself. It is a problem because of what it does to the four things after it, and to the catering call, and to a speaker who has a car booked. The forecast column answers that without anyone doing arithmetic under pressure.

This is also why you enter actuals as you go rather than reconstructing them afterwards. A showflow filled in after the show is a record. A showflow filled in during the show is an instrument.

Two columns exist that most templates do not have, and they are the reason this pack is worth the extra width: Recoverable, and Recovery to Use.

Recoverable is how much time an item could give back if it had to — the slack you know is in it. A twenty-minute panel with a hard ten-minute floor is ten minutes recoverable. A pre-recorded film is zero: it is as long as it is. Filling this column in before the show is the actual work, and it is a conversation with the people who own each item, not a guess.

Recovery to Use is what you have agreed to spend. The distinction matters. Knowing you could take four minutes off the closing panel is not permission to take it, and a producer who compresses an item without telling its owner has not recovered time so much as created an argument for later.

Keeping them in separate columns means the sheet always shows both what is theoretically available and what has actually been sanctioned — and at the end you can see which items you leaned on, which is the single most useful thing to bring to the next production meeting.

Every show changes on the day. What separates a calm show from a fraught one is whether the changes are written down and whether everyone is working from the same version.

Each row carries a Change ID, a Change Summary, a Change Owner and a Confirmed By. The CHANGE LOG sheet holds the full record — what was raised, by whom, against which cue, its impact in minutes, who approved it, and whether it is closed.

Confirmed By is the column people skip and then wish they had not. It is the difference between "we moved the awards forward" and "we moved the awards forward, and the client’s events lead confirmed it at 14:20". One of those survives a post-event conversation.

Alongside the change columns, each row carries Department, Owner, Speaker or Talent, Media or Source, the Call or Cue itself, a Fallback, Dependencies, a Timing Class, Criticality and Status. Not every column earns its place on every show. Delete the ones that do not — a column nobody fills in is worse than no column, because it teaches the crew that parts of the sheet are decorative.

A spreadsheet is genuinely good at this. It is fast, everyone has one, it works with no signal in a loading bay, and you can print it. For a great many shows it is the right answer and you should stop reading here.

It stops being the right answer at a specific point, and the point is not size. It is the number of people who need the same information at the same time in different forms. The moment the audio operator, the caller, the speaker in the green room and the attendee on their phone all need a view of the same running order, a file has to be copied, and copies drift.

That is the problem EventBlok is built for: one event structure, and every person getting the view of it they need. If this pack is doing the job, keep using it. If you are emailing version seven at midnight, that is the signal.