Utgave builds the flatplan. You make the magazine.

Every flatplan I have seen began life in a spreadsheet, and most of them never left. There is a tab for editorial, a tab for ads, and a column somebody added four years ago that three people now read differently.

Utgave reads that file. Not a tidied-up version of it — the actual one, tabs and all, in the order the tabs are in and the order the rows are in. Row order is data. An import that quietly sorts your sheet has thrown something away and not told you.

Then it stops, shows you what it thinks, and waits.

It is shown your headings and told not to trust them. On my own file the adverts tab heads its advertiser column "Article title", which is simply wrong — the extent is column E, the title is column B, and it works that out from what is in the cells. Every page that ends up in your plan is then read out of the file itself, on the server, from the spreadsheet you uploaded.

Before anything is created you get a screen headed Check the mapping: a dropdown per field listing every column in your sheet by letter and heading, and five real rows underneath carrying their own Excel row numbers, so you can look from one to the other. Anything you disagree with, you change. Nothing has been written at that point — press discard and there is nothing to undo.

It works out which tab is advertising from the shape of the values. The name of the tab only breaks a tie when the shape is ambiguous. Your header row does not have to be row 1. Blank rows in the middle do not end the import. An extent written "3 or 4" stays a range instead of being quietly rounded.

Every page arrives white. The tool will not guess a colour it was not given — colour here means section, and a guessed section is worse than an unassigned one. A white page is honest. Assigning them is the first real pass of planning, and it is the pass where you are actually thinking about the issue.

And then the spreadsheet goes quiet. The import creates a plan; it does not stay married to the sheet. No sync, no re-import into an existing plan, no export back to .xlsx. Spreadsheet in, PDF out. I have come to think that is the right shape — two live copies of the same plan is the problem, not the feature.

This is the part a spreadsheet loses. A feature that was six pages is now four. An advertiser pulls. Somebody finds two more pages of a portfolio and the editor wants them in. Every one of those is a manual renumber — and it is not the renumbering that costs you, it is that from that moment you cannot trust a page number in any email sent before this afternoon.

In Utgave the folio is not a value you maintain. It is derived from where the page sits. Insert four pages after page 22 and everything from 23 to the back takes its new number in the same breath, covers included: C1 and C2 at the front, C3 and C4 at the back, the interior running from 1. There is nothing to go and update, because there was never anything stored to update.

The trade is real and worth saying out loud: because folios are positional, there are no custom page numbers and no section that restarts at 1. If you need those, this is not your tool. I would rather you read that here than find it in week three.

The bar along the bottom keeps a live count of pages, ads and editorial on every tab. When the ad director asks on Thursday where the ratio is sitting, you read it off the screen instead of recounting. And search dims what does not match rather than hiding it — a filtered list tells you where a page is; a dimmed grid tells you where it is in the issue.

Every change saves itself about a second after you stop typing. If a save fails it retries, backing off each time, and if it still fails you get a bar across the top telling you plainly that your changes are not stored, with a button to try again. It does not say "Saved" and mean "sent". The tick appears when the server has actually said so.

If your session expires while you are working, the editor stays open and your unsaved work stays in the page. Log in again in another tab, come back, press retry. Losing an afternoon to a silent timeout is exactly how people end up keeping a spreadsheet "just in case" — and keeping a spreadsheet just in case is how you end up with two plans that disagree.

Me. I produce IAM 360, and I built Utgave because the spreadsheet stopped being able to hold the issue. Most of what is in it exists because something went wrong on a real book and I did not want it to go wrong the same way twice.

This is not a company yet. There is no signup, no plan table, no trial counting down in the corner. It runs, it is used on every issue of a magazine that actually goes to print, and I am working out what it looks like as something other people can have.

If that sounds like your problem, write to me and tell me about your issue — how many pages, how many ads, what your spreadsheet looks like, and which column everybody argues about. That is a more useful first conversation than a demo.

Goes to Brian, who produces IAM 360 and wrote this page.