A flatplan template that expects you to change it

It is free. There is no form in front of it and no address to hand over — the link below is the file. Nothing is collected, because there is nothing here to collect it with.

Inside are two sheets: an articles sheet with six columns and an advertising sheet with five, and a worked example already filled in on both.

Excel or Google Sheets. No email, no signup.

I am handing you a template while telling you that no canonical set of columns exists. Both of those are true at once, and the tension between them is the honest position rather than a thing to smooth over.

I have two real flatplan spreadsheets from one magazine and they do not have the same columns as each other — the evidence is here, laid out field by field. A template that called itself the correct shape would be contradicted by the second file anybody opened.

So this is not the shape. It is one shape that works, offered because the alternative is a blank sheet at 11pm.

The sample content is invented. The magazine does not exist, the advertisers do not exist, and neither do the people the rows are assigned to. It is in there so the file opens as something legible — a plan you can read and edit around — rather than a bare header row.

The headers are on row 2, under a title row, and the import read them correctly.

These column names are also not the names on the spreadsheets they came from. On the advertising sheet, the real files call the advertiser column "Article title" — the source document records that header and marks it (sic). The header is what it is. What follows from it is the part worth knowing: nothing in Utgave matches on header text, so either name imports the same. The rename is for the person reading the file, not for the importer.

I built this file today, then took it straight through Utgave's confirm screen and watched what happened. All eleven columns mapped — six on the articles sheet, five on the advertising sheet — with no errors, and a 24-page plan came out the other side carrying its own sections.

24 is 16 plus 8. One row is one page: the extents in the page count column are not summed into that number, so what you get back is a page per row, in the order the rows sat in.

That shows the file works as given. It does not show that any particular changed version of it will — and changing it is the whole idea, so the only way to know about your version is to change it and find out.