Showflow examples and a free showflow template you can download
Two showflow templates you can download as CSV — one for a single room, one for a multi-room, multi-day programme — with worked examples, every column explained, and what to change before you use them.
The short answer
A showflow template is a spreadsheet with one row per cue and a column for the cue number, the time, the duration, the item, the department that owns it, the person calling it, the notes and the state. Two are attached to this article: one for a single room, one for a multi-room, multi-day programme. Both are CSV, so they open in Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers. Download one, delete the example rows, keep the columns.
Download the single-room showflow template (CSV) — one day, one hall, thirty-two example cues from the crew call to the de-rig. Download the multi-room showflow template (CSV) — two days, three rooms, twenty-seven example cues including the parallel breakouts and the turnaround between them.
They are CSV rather than a native Excel workbook, and that is deliberate. A CSV opens in every spreadsheet application on every platform without conversion, survives being emailed to somebody working on something else, and can be read in a text editor on a machine that has no spreadsheet software on it at all. There is no macro, no protected sheet, no formula and nothing to enable. If you want a workbook, open the CSV and save it as .xlsx — that is one step, and it is then your file rather than mine.
What is in each column?
Eight columns, and each one has to earn its place. A column nobody fills in during a show is a column that makes the sheet harder to read at the only moment it matters.
- Cue
- Decimal, not integer. 12.0, 12.1, 12.2 lets you insert a cue at 08:15 on the day without renumbering everything after it — which you will, and usually twice.
- Time
- The clock time the cue is planned to be called, twenty-four hour. It is a plan rather than a promise, and everyone reading the sheet should know which of the two they are looking at.
- Duration (mins)
- Whole minutes as a plain number. A duration typed as 00:15 is a time value in most spreadsheets and will not add up; typed as 15 it will.
- Item
- What happens, in the imperative, short enough to say out loud on comms. "House to half", not "the house lighting should be reduced to approximately fifty percent".
- Department
- Production, stage, sound, lighting, graphics, AV, front of house. Whoever is scanning for their own cues filters on this column, so it is the one that has to be consistent.
- Owner
- The position, not the person. "A1", "show caller", "stage manager". Positions survive a crew change on the second day; a sheet full of first names does not.
- Notes
- What the owner needs that will not fit in the item. Battery levels, which camera is the wide, how long the changeover actually took in rehearsal.
- Status
- Standby, GO, Done, Cut. The most-read column on the day, and the reason a showflow that exists only as a printout is stale within the hour.
What do the examples show?
Both files ship filled in with a real shape of day rather than placeholder rows, because a blank template teaches you nothing about granularity — and granularity is the thing a first showflow gets wrong.
The single-room example runs a one-day conference in one hall. It starts at the 07:00 crew call and ends with the de-rig, and it deliberately includes the parts of the day people leave out: the line check and the RF walk, the graphics check where somebody reads every name and job title aloud, the rehearsal of the opening and nothing else, the changeover from lectern to four chairs that was timed at ninety seconds, and the five-minute warning that goes to the confidence monitor rather than over comms.
The multi-room example runs two days across a main hall and two breakout rooms. It adds three columns — day, room and track — and shows the two things that only appear once an event has more than one room: cues that run in parallel and must not be called on the same channel, and the shared turnaround every room depends on. The ten-minute turnaround in that file is marked as a hard floor, because shortening it is the standard way of trying to recover time and the standard way of losing more.
Both examples stop short in the afternoon on purpose. There is one row that says to continue the numbering and re-time the block above, because copying a morning you have already proved beats inventing an afternoon you have not.
How to fill in the template
The order of operations matters more than the tool. Filled in this way the sheet tends to hold together; filled in out of order, you spend show day reconciling it against the programme.
Start from the published programme
Put every session in first, as a row, with its real start time and duration. Do not add a single cue until the session rows agree with the agenda the audience has been given.
Add the gaps as rows
Changeovers, walk-ons, breaks, room turnarounds and the crew call. Twelve unmodelled minutes between two sessions is twelve minutes nobody owns, and that is where the day actually goes late.
Break each session into cues
A dozen to twenty cues for a forty-five minute keynote is normal: walk-on music, house lights, VT, first slide, lower third, mic runners, walk-off. If a row cannot be actioned by the person reading it, it is a note, not a cue.
Give every cue a department and an owner
A cue with no owner is called by whoever notices, which on a bad day is nobody. Fill the department column before you fill the notes column.
Read it aloud in running order
Before doors, out loud, in sequence. Anything ambiguous when spoken is ambiguous on comms, and comms is where it will be heard. Fix the wording, not the formatting.
Decide who edits it during the show
One person. Everyone else raises. Put that position at the top of the file if you have to. It is a discipline question rather than a spreadsheet one, and it is the difference between a running order and an argument.
What should I change first?
The department names. Every production has its own, and using somebody else's is the fastest way to have a cue land with nobody. If your lighting operator is LX and your sound positions are A1 and A2, rename the values before the file goes to anyone.
Then the status vocabulary. These files use Standby, GO, Done and Cut. Some rooms say Ready and Take, some use colours. Pick one set of words, write it down, and do not let a second set appear halfway through the afternoon.
The times last. Times are the only column guaranteed to be wrong, and re-timing a sheet whose structure is still moving is work you will do again.
And delete the example rows before you send it. A sheet that still has somebody else's panel session in it is not a template, it is a mistake waiting to be read aloud.
How EventBlok approaches this
Everything above works in a spreadsheet, which is why the templates are spreadsheets. This section is what EventBlok specifically does, so you can judge whether it is relevant to you.
EventBlok does not ask you to fill in a template. Import takes CSV and Excel in any column order, along with schedules, documents and the decks where the programme sometimes lives, and produces the sessions with their durations, a record for every speaker it spots, the rooms referenced in the file, and a starter showflow per session — every row reviewable before it becomes the event. If your showflow is already in a shape that works, that shape is the input.
From there the showflow is a deeper view of the published programme rather than a second document. Department views for GFX, LX, A/V, FOH and stage are filters on one shared record rather than printed variants, and every view prints with its version and timestamp on it. Planned, actual and projected times sit alongside each other, so a two-minute overrun in the opening shows you its consequence at 16:00.
What a showflow is, and how it differs from the agenda, is in what is a showflow and agenda vs showflow vs run sheet.
Common questions
Is the showflow template free?
Yes. Both files are free to download and use, including on commercial events. There is no sign-up, no email address to hand over and no licence to accept.
Will the CSV open in Excel?
Yes — Excel opens a .csv file directly. If your Windows regional settings use a semicolon as the list separator, Excel may put the whole row in one column; open it with Data, then From Text/CSV, and choose the comma as the delimiter. Google Sheets and Numbers both import it with no settings at all.
Why is there no Excel .xlsx version of the showflow template?
Because CSV is the honest format for a template. It opens in every spreadsheet application on every platform, it can be read in a text editor when the laptop with Excel on it is still in the van, and it cannot carry a broken macro or a protected sheet. If you want a workbook, open the CSV and save it as .xlsx — one step, and it is then your file.
How detailed should a showflow be?
Detailed enough that every row can be actioned by the person reading it without asking a question. A forty-five minute keynote is usually a dozen to twenty cues. The failure to avoid is granularity drift: a sheet that starts cue-level and degrades into a session list halfway through the afternoon, while the crew carry on trusting it.
What is the difference between a showflow and an agenda?
The agenda tells an audience what is on. The showflow tells the crew what to do and when, one row per cue, each with a department and an owner. One forty-five minute session is a single agenda row and a dozen or more showflow cues.
Can I use the template for a multi-day or multi-room event?
Use the multi-room file. It carries day, room and track columns, and the example runs two days across three rooms with parallel breakouts. For one room over several days, add a day column to the simple file and let the cue numbering run on rather than restarting it each morning.
Plan the event. Publish the programme. Run the show.
One event spine, many views. Build the programme once, then give every person the right live view of it.