Paste and import

Most patches already exist somewhere — a Google Sheet the festival has kept for years, a console export, last year's file. Crewbox meets them where they are: paste a block straight into the grid, or import a CSV whole.

Paste from Google Sheets

Copy a rectangle of cells in Google Sheets (or Excel), click the crewbox grid cell where its top-left corner should land, and paste. The block fills right and down from there:

• New channels are added automatically if the block runs past the bottom.
• Columns that don't fit the sheet are dropped — the toast says so: "Pasted 24 cells · added 3 channel(s) · 2 column(s) didn't fit".
• The whole paste is one undo step — ⌘Z takes it all back.

This is the workhorse for "the stage manager just sent me three more rows".

Import a CSV

⇪ Import CSV on the sheet list (or just drop a .csv file onto the sheet list page) builds a new sheet from a spreadsheet export. Two shapes are understood:

1. A plain grid — headers matched by meaning, one row per channel.
2. A real festival master patch — the shape these sheets actually have in the wild: a title row, a colour legend for the sub-snakes, a two-tier header where act names span their column groups, house inputs down the side. Crewbox recognises this and pulls out the acts, their set times, the house inputs, the sub-boxes with their colours, and the changeovers.

Importing a festival sheet is also how the box learns the day: the acts in the file land on the running order, so lighting, stage management and the countdowns on every phone get them at the same moment audio does. Import the same file twice — a second sheet for the same stage, a re-import after a correction — and it reconciles with the day already there rather than listing it again. Blank cells in the file leave a time somebody fixed by hand alone.

The import toast is honest about what happened: how many channels and acts came through, which columns it didn't recognise, and any disagreement between the changeovers written in the sheet and the gaps the set times imply.

Getting data back out

Export on any sheet downloads it as CSV, readable by anything. What you export is the grid as it stands — including everything derived from it being live, so the file you send the PA company is never stale.

If an import looks wrong

• Columns missing — check the toast; unrecognised headers are named there. Rename the column in the spreadsheet (Input, Description, Mic/DI, Stand are all understood, with common variants) and re-import.
• Acts came in as one column — the file lost its two-tier header (single-sheet CSV exports flatten merged cells). Export the master patch tab specifically, not the whole workbook.
• Changeover warnings — not an error. The sheet's changeovers disagree with its set times, and crewbox refuses to guess which is right — the lineup page explains.