Paste it straight in.

Select, copy, paste

Highlight the columns in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers. Copy. Click into the first length field on the calculator and paste. Every row lands as its own cut. You do not have to type anything twice, and you do not have to save anything as a CSV first.

What the columns should be

Left to right: length, quantity, label.

2400    4    Upright
1800    2    Rail
650     8    Noggin
1260    2    Head

Tabs, commas or spaces: all three work, because all three are what actually comes off a clipboard depending on where it was copied from. Quantity and label are optional: a single column of lengths imports fine and everything defaults to one.

If your spreadsheet is not shaped like that

It rarely is. A few things worth knowing:

• Header rows are ignored. A row that does not start with a number is skipped, so you can paste the header along with the data.
• Extra columns are ignored. Anything past the third column is dropped, so a sheet with a price, a drawing reference and a due date on it still imports cleanly.
• Units come along. If you are working in inches, cells like 15 3/4 import as fractions. see the imperial notes.
• Blank rows are skipped rather than becoming empty cuts.

The paste box

If you would rather see what you are importing before it lands, use Paste a list in the cut list panel. It opens a text box, you paste into it, and it tells you how many rows it found before adding them.

And out again

The plan comes back as a CSV as well as a PDF, so it can go straight back into the spreadsheet it came from, with the bars to buy, the cuts per bar, and the offcuts as separate sections.

Try it →