For a program that already exists — in a spreadsheet, in last year's system, in a document from the scientific committee. Twenty minutes and a clean file, and it is in Rostrum.
Import is not a product; it is part of every event. Find it on the Imports tab, which also keeps the history of every import you have run.
Import is for a program that is already arranged — you know the sessions, the rooms and the times, and you want them in Rostrum without retyping. It is a migration tool.
If the arranging has not happened yet, this is the wrong chapter. Do not go and build the schedule in Excel so that you can import it — Chapter 14 is where that work belongs, and it is faster there because Rostrum knows your rooms, your tracks and your venue's clock.
The event must have a main venue, and that venue must have a timezone. Import refuses to run otherwise, and it refuses deliberately rather than guessing — a schedule imported into the wrong timezone is worse than no schedule, because it looks right.
There is no template to download
This surprises people, and it is a feature. Rostrum reads whatever column headings your spreadsheet already uses and proposes a mapping — Session Title, Session Name and Track Session all map to the same field without you renaming anything. You confirm or correct its guesses in step four.
Accepted formats are .xlsx, .xls and .csv, up to 50 MB.
Two kinds of import
- Agenda — sessions, their presentations, and the speakers who give them. Rooms are created automatically from the room names in your file.
- Posters — posters and their authors.
Delegate lists and contact books are imported separately, from the Attendee App tab and the organization contact book respectively.
The seven steps
Upload
Choose Agenda or Posters, and drop the file in.
Choose the sheet
Skipped automatically for single-sheet files.
Point at the header row
For files that carry a title block or logo above the real headings.
Map the columns
Rostrum's guesses, ready to correct. Date and time columns get a format picker here — this is where you tell it that
20260315is a date, if it has not worked that out.Preview and fix
The whole file as a grid, every row marked valid, warning or error, and editable in place. Fix the six broken rows here rather than going back to Excel.
Run it
The import runs in the background with a progress bar. You can close the tab; it keeps going.
Review the result
Counts of what was created, updated and skipped, with a full log.
Your progress is saved continuously. If you leave halfway through mapping a 4,000-row file, the Imports tab offers to resume exactly where you stopped.
What goes in the columns
One row describes one presentation and its speaker, with the session repeated across the rows that belong to it. For posters, one row is one poster and one author — repeat the poster title to add co-authors.
| Group | Required | Also understood |
|---|---|---|
| Person | Email, first name, last name | Display name, company, job title, credentials |
| Session | Name, session type | Description, date, start and end time, level, track name, room name, chair's email, scheduling mode, your own reference ID |
| Presentation | Title, presentation type | Description, abstract, date, start and end time, level, order within session, keywords, your own reference ID |
| Poster | Title | Abstract, track, categories, tags, board number, location, session name, status, whether this author is the primary one |
Session types are Keynote, Presentation, Workshop, Panel, Break, Networking and Exhibition. Presentation types are Oral, Poster, Keynote, Panel, Workshop, Lightning, Demo and Case Study.
If a presentation carries no times of its own it inherits its session's date, and the session is treated as ordered rather than timed — presentations run in sequence within the slot instead of each having a clock time. Supply presentation times and it becomes a timed session automatically.
Errors and warnings are different
A missing required field, a malformed email address, a value that is not one of the allowed types, a date that cannot be read, or the same email address spelled with two different names.
An end time before a start time, the same session named twice with different times, a duplicated presentation title inside one session, or a value that disagrees with a record already in Rostrum.
Both are shown in the preview grid before anything is written, and again in the log afterwards. From the import history you can download three spreadsheets: the file as processed, the rows that were skipped, and the rows that errored — so a colleague can fix them and you can re-import just those.
Undoing an import
Every import can be rolled back. Rollback deletes what that import created — the sessions, presentations, posters, rooms and user accounts it made — in the correct order.
Records the import updated rather than created are left alone. If your second import corrected the times on sessions that already existed, rolling it back will not restore the old times. Rollback is a clean undo of a fresh import, not a version history.
What the import quietly does for you
- Creates accounts for speakers who have none, and grants them the Speaker role on their presentation — so they can be sent a magic link and upload their file the same afternoon.
- Creates rooms it has not seen before, on the main venue.
- Matches people by email address, so the same speaker across twelve rows is one person.
- Converts every date and time from venue wall-clock into the correct underlying instant.
The three routes are not exclusive, and most real events use two. A common pattern: import last year's fixed skeleton, add this year's invited keynotes and sponsored sessions by hand, then run a call for abstracts to fill the remaining slots — all on the same event. What you should not do is build a schedule in a spreadsheet purely so you can import it; Chapter 14 is faster and knows your rooms.