Run of show builder
Type the running order, set how long each thing takes, and the times work themselves out. Print it, save it, or move it into 1pm when you want your crew watching it live.
Build your run of show
| Start | Length | Item | Who |
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Built free at 1pm.app/tools/run-of-show Take it further
Print it, save it, or move it into 1pm to share it live with your crew and suppliers.
Copied. Three steps to have it live:
- Start a free 1pm trial, no card needed.
- Create your event and edit the event portal.
- Choose Paste in and paste. Every row lands with its time and length.
Add a row with a name on it first, then there will be something to copy.
Saved in this browser only. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no account to create.
Start from a template instead
Four starting points, each a full running order with realistic lengths rather than a set of empty rows. Load one, then cut what you do not need. That is almost always faster than writing a sheet from nothing, because the rows people forget are the ones nobody thinks to add: the sound check, the pack down, the twenty minutes it takes to seat a room.
Wedding day timeline
Getting ready through to farewell, with the ceremony pinned and the photography blocks where they actually belong.
Conference or corporate
Crew access, registration, keynote, breakouts and networking, with doors pinned to the time on the invitation.
Charity gala
Room set through to carriages, with the auction, the appeal and the courses interleaved the way they run on the night.
General event run sheet
A load in, a program and a pack down. The neutral starting point when none of the others quite fit.
Why the times move on their own
Every run of show gets rewritten. The band wants an extra fifteen minutes, the kitchen needs the mains cleared sooner, the client moves the ceremony back half an hour four days out. In a document or a spreadsheet, each of those edits means retyping every time below the change, and the fifth time you do it at eleven at night is the time you get one wrong.
So this tool does not store a start time against each row. It stores how long each thing takes, and works the times out from the top. Move the start, and the whole day moves. Give the speeches ten more minutes, and everything after the speeches shifts by ten. The arithmetic that used to be the work is not work any more.
Pin the things that will not move
A cascade on its own is not enough, because some times are not yours. The ceremony is at three whether or not hair and makeup ran long. Doors are at seven because that is what is printed on two hundred invitations. So any row can be pinned to a fixed time, and a pinned row becomes a new anchor for everything under it.
The useful part is the gap that appears in front of a pin. If your load in finishes at 4:20 and doors are pinned at 5:00, the sheet says you have forty minutes spare. If it finishes at 5:15, it says you are fifteen minutes over, in red, right where you will see it. That number is the one that tells you whether the plan is real, and it is the number almost nobody works out by hand until the morning of the event.
Writing a run of show that survives the day
The format matters less than what goes in it. A few things separate the sheets that hold up from the ones that get abandoned by the second course.
- Start at access, not at arrival. The riskiest hours of an event are the ones before any guest sees it. If your sheet starts when doors open, the part most likely to go wrong is the part nobody planned.
- Put a name on every row. An item with no owner is an item everyone assumes someone else has. "Cake cutting" is a hope. "Cake cutting, Kitchen" is a plan.
- Write lengths you believe. Twenty minutes of speeches means forty minutes of speeches. Seating a room of two hundred takes fifteen, not five. Optimism in a run of show does not save time, it just moves the overrun to somewhere less convenient.
- Leave gaps on purpose. Slack in front of a pin is not wasted, it is the only reason a small delay stays small. A sheet with no gaps in it is a sheet that fails on the first thing that runs long.
- Say what happens, not what is true. "Bar open" is a state. "Bar opens, two staff on" is an instruction someone can act on.
- Keep one copy. Three versions of the run of show in three inboxes is how a photographer ends up in the wrong room at the right time. If you email a PDF, make sure everyone knows which one is current.
What this tool deliberately does not do
It does not share. There is no link to send, no account and no server holding your event, because everything here stays in your browser. That is a real limitation and it is also the reason the tool needs nothing from you.
On the day, though, a printed run of show is out of date the moment anything moves. The crew are working off paper, the client is asking what time the cake is, and the only person who knows the current version is whoever last edited it. That is the problem 1pm exists to solve: one live run of show that your crew, your suppliers and your client all watch update in real time, each seeing only the items that involve them, on their own phone, with no login. When you are ready, the Copy for 1pm button moves this sheet across in one paste.
More on the thinking behind that: why a run of show was never a spreadsheet job, why you need a live digital run of show, and the run of show help article for how the paid version works.
Common questions
A run of show, or ROS, is the minute by minute plan for an event: what happens, when it starts, how long it takes and who is responsible. It covers the whole day rather than just the guest-facing part, so it starts at supplier access and ends when the room is vacated. Everyone working the event runs off the same one, which is the entire point of writing it down.
It is free and there is no account. There is no email wall, no card and no trial clock. Your run of show is saved in your own browser and never sent anywhere, so there is nothing for us to see even if we wanted to.
In this browser, on this device, in local storage. Come back on the same browser and it is still here. It will not follow you to your phone, and clearing your browsing data will remove it. If it matters, use the Save to a file button and keep the file somewhere you trust.
It fixes that row to a clock time instead of letting it follow the row above. Use it for the moments that are not yours to move: a ceremony at three, doors at seven, a keynote that is on the invitation. Everything below a pin re-flows from the pin, and if the rows above run past it the tool tells you by how much rather than quietly sliding it.
Not from this page, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight. Sharing means storing your event on someone else's server, and this tool stores nothing. You can print it, save it to a PDF, or send the file. If you want your crew and suppliers watching a live version that updates as the day moves, that is what 1pm does, and you can move this run of show straight into it.
Yes. Run of show is the usual term in the United States, run sheet is the usual term in Australia and the UK, and the document is the same thing. Some teams also call it a production schedule or a timeline. Whatever it is called, it is a list of items with times, lengths and owners.
Yes. Caterers, planners, photographers, AV crews and venues use it for paid work, and there is nothing to buy or attribute. It is a free tool, not a trial.
When the sheet needs to be live, not printed
1pm shares one run of show with your crew, your suppliers and your client in real time. Each of them sees only their own items, on their phone, with no login and no app to install. Move this one across in about a minute.