# Import Beats from a text/csv/xls file?

**URL:** <https://forum.hollywoodcamerawork.com/t/import-beats-from-a-text-csv-xls-file/2023>\
**Category:** Causality Story Sequencer\
**Created:** [September 8, 2026, 2:56pm UTC](https://forum.hollywoodcamerawork.com/t/import-beats-from-a-text-csv-xls-file/2023 "2026-09-08T14:56:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ChrisBold](https://forum.hollywoodcamerawork.com/user_avatar/forum.hollywoodcamerawork.com/chrisbold/32/317_2.png) [@ChrisBold](https://forum.hollywoodcamerawork.com/u/ChrisBold)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2026, 2:56pm UTC](https://forum.hollywoodcamerawork.com/t/import-beats-from-a-text-csv-xls-file/2023/1 "2026-09-08T14:56:06Z")

</div>

Sorry if this has been asked/answered:

Is there a method to import beats through a text/csv/xlsx file?

I have hundreds of written beats (old school index cards from back in the day), I’d love to run those through OCR, put them in a file, and import into Causality. Would save me days (weeks) of work.

Maybe not a lot of call for this feature, but figure I’d ask just in case

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![perholmes](https://forum.hollywoodcamerawork.com/user_avatar/forum.hollywoodcamerawork.com/perholmes/32/3_2.png) [@perholmes](https://forum.hollywoodcamerawork.com/u/perholmes)\
**Post date:** [October 7, 2026, 1:28pm UTC](https://forum.hollywoodcamerawork.com/t/import-beats-from-a-text-csv-xls-file/2023/2 "2026-10-07T13:28:22Z")

</div>

Hi,

There isn’t but there should be, and it’s a trivial feature to add. All in all, we’re completely clear of the year-long refactor, and we have all our velocity back, so things are happening much quicker. This one is already on the list, and guaranteed to happen.

Let’s spit ball on how it’s implemented. I’m imagining that one could want to both import just a list of beat titles, and also possibly alternative beat titles and synopsis. So perhaps it should be possible to import in different formats.

An immediate difficulty then is that a synopsis could be multiple lines, and now a simple alternating line scheme wouldn’t work. So I’m wondering if we really need markup, and then Fountain is the obvious choice.

I’m not sure if we import beats from Fountain right now, but we could trivially add the ability.

```auto
# The discovery
= Anna finds the missing letter and realizes her brother lied.

# The confrontation
= Anna confronts her brother, but he refuses to explain.

```

Fountain is plain text, and the above means that # is the beat title, and = is the beat description.

How would it work for you if you had to prefix all your beat titles with #? And would you use the ability to import synopsis at the same time? I could imagine a brainstorming document already written to use these two markup indicators.

Per

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ChrisBold](https://forum.hollywoodcamerawork.com/user_avatar/forum.hollywoodcamerawork.com/chrisbold/32/317_2.png) [@ChrisBold](https://forum.hollywoodcamerawork.com/u/ChrisBold)\
**Post date:** [October 9, 2026, 9:32pm UTC](https://forum.hollywoodcamerawork.com/t/import-beats-from-a-text-csv-xls-file/2023/3 "2026-10-09T21:32:46Z")

</div>

Hi Per,

Thanks for the reply - I’m used to re-arranging data for spreadsheets, sql databases, etc. So whatever the format, I can roll with it. Fountain looks clean, straightforward.

-Chris