Spreadsheets
Planning a shoot in a spreadsheet
A spreadsheet holds a shot list well. What it will not do is work out the day: the running order, the daylight, the call sheet and the reshuffle on set are all arithmetic the sheet leaves to you, at the moments you have least time for it. Latentshoot does all four from the same columns.
What a spreadsheet is genuinely better at
It is already open, it costs nothing, and nobody has to be taught it. Any column you can think of is one right-click away, which matters on the odd job that wants a field no product would have thought to include. Sorting and filtering are immediate. You can share it with a producer who has never heard of any of this and they will open it. And there is no lock-in worth the name, because the file is the data.
All of that is true of the list itself. What a spreadsheet will not do is the four things that should follow from it.
The four jobs it will not do
1. Work out the day
A shot list with a duration on every row already contains the running order. In a spreadsheet it stays contained: a running-order column has to be typed, and it is wrong the moment two groups swap over because the light changed. Every time under the change is retyped by hand, including the wrap.
2. Tell you where the light is
Sunrise, sunset, golden hour and blue hour for the location and the date are arithmetic, and a spreadsheet will not do it for you. So the day is planned against a time somebody looked up on their phone in the car park, and the answer to “will we reach the coast before the sun goes” is a guess made under pressure.
3. Produce the call sheet
The call sheet is not a different set of facts from the shot list — it is the same day, written for the people arriving on it. In a spreadsheet it is a second document built by hand from the first, and the two disagree from the first change onwards. The version printed the night before is the one everybody is holding.
4. Survive the day itself
Hair and make-up run forty minutes long. On paper, the answer is to re-add a column of numbers in your head while people wait for it, and then to decide what to drop without the list in front of you saying which rows were the must-haves.
Where the cost actually lands
A spreadsheet does not cost money and it does not cost much on shoot one. What it takes is the hour spent rebuilding the running order, the gear list and the call sheet on every job after that, and then the second hour redoing all three when the plan moves. That is the same hour every time, and it never gets shorter.
When a spreadsheet is the right answer
If you shoot a handful of times a year, the hour above is cheaper than any software and you should keep the spreadsheet. If the jobs are short enough that the running order fits on one page and never changes, there is nothing here to buy. And if the client wants the list as a file they can edit, a spreadsheet is what they mean.
For those cases, the shot list template page writes out the column order to set up, with rows filled in so the shape is obvious. Take it and stay where you are. The pricing page makes the same point about the free plan, for the same reason.
What changes the arithmetic is repetition. A photographer shooting the same kind of job every fortnight is rebuilding the same three documents every fortnight, and is also the person best placed to benefit from durations that get more accurate each time — the estimate for a new shot is the median of what that kind of shot has actually taken on your days.
What the same list looks like here
The columns barely change. Size, angle, orientation, focal length, aperture, lighting, wardrobe, props, who is in frame, a priority and a duration are all fields, and the sizes and angles are chosen from a list rather than typed, so the second half of a long list agrees with the first half.
Two of the columns stop being columns. A group is the section of the day a shot belongs to, and its letter, its shot count and its running time are read off the rows underneath it — so dragging a group re-letters and re-totals the sheet with nothing to renumber. A tag cuts the other way, across the groups, which is the cut you deliver on. Groups and tags, worked through is the long version.
Everything after the list is then arithmetic rather than a document. The running order is built from the shot list and laid against the day’s light, the call sheet follows from it, and on-set mode re-runs the same calculation with what each set-up actually took.
If a genre list is a faster start than a blank one, there are three worked ones: a wedding day, a product day and a food day.
Frequently asked
Is a spreadsheet good enough for a shot list?
For the shot list itself, yes. Columns, sorting and filtering are what a spreadsheet is for, and the column order that works is written out on the shot list template page. What a spreadsheet cannot do is derive the running order, the daylight band, the gear list and the call sheet from those columns, so each of those becomes a document you maintain by hand alongside it.
What should a shot list spreadsheet contain?
A reference, the shot, its size, angle and orientation, focal length and aperture where they matter, the lighting, the wardrobe or prop note, who is in frame, a priority and an estimated duration in whole minutes. The duration is the one worth being strict about: without it the running order and the wrap time cannot be worked out from the sheet at all.
Can I import a spreadsheet into Latentshoot?
There is no spreadsheet import today. The connector is the closest thing to one: an assistant with access to your file can read the rows and add them as shots, in the product’s own fields, over the Model Context Protocol. For a list of any normal size, typing it in is also not the obstacle it sounds like — the sizes and angles are chosen from a list rather than typed.
How much time does a spreadsheet actually cost on a shoot?
Not on the first one. It costs on the second and third, and the cost is rebuilding the running order, the call sheet and the gear list every job, plus redoing all three whenever a group moves. If you shoot a few times a year, that is genuinely cheaper than paying for software, and the pricing page says the same thing.
No card, and the free plan is not a trial. One active project at a time is enough for a whole job, and the spreadsheet is still there if it does not suit.