Printable Playa Schedule 2023

Summary:
This is a giant spreadsheet with every single event and art installation at Burning Man. Scroll down, download, and start getting excited ;)

Details:
When you arrive at the gates of Black Rock City, the greeters hand you a thick booklet full of all kinds of events, parties, classes, & games. It's awesome, but the last thing I wanted to do when I got there was sit in my tent reading. Only after returning from my virgin burn did I leaf through that book, and realize just how many incredible things I wished I'd known about. Next year, I wanted to go through the list in advance.

Unfortunately, I found the official Playa Events page to be a bit frustrating - you have to click each event one at a time, few include a location, and many are repeated over & over again. So to make things easier, I decided to whip up a script to export the whole event list to Excel.

With Excel you can see everything all at once, sort however you like, trim those you aren't interested in, add notes, or share & collaborate with friends. When finished, you've got a simple at-a-glance spreadsheet that you can print & take to the Playa. I've structured it with each day as a separate column - that way you can glance down a column to see what's happening at a moment's notice. I've also included the full list of art installations, and supplementary location data from BurnerMap.com & The Unofficial BRC Map.

I hope you find it useful (leave me a note below if you do!), & to see you all on the Playa )'(



The download is available in two flavors:
  • 2023 Pre-formatted Spreadsheet. If this is your first time here, this is the version I'd suggest. It's pre-formatted to be quicker & easier to read, providing the best first-look at what this is about. The data is current as of 08/19/2023.
  • 2023 Tab-Separated Values. Check back in 2024! :) This will actually run the script & generate a new file by pulling data directly from BM.org, providing the most up-to-date list possible. If this is your first time here or if you're not experienced with Excel, I'd suggest starting with the pre-formatted spreadsheet instead. Note that it takes a minute to generate, so please click once & be patient. It may not work properly in very outdated versions of Excel (2007 & earlier). If you'd like to manually replicate my Pre-Formatted Spreadsheet, here are the steps I use.
How To Format The CSV For Viewing/Printing (using Excel 2019 on Windows):
  • Open the CSV file in Excel
  • File->Save As->Excel Workbook (xlsx)
  • Select All->Calibri 8
  • Select All->Right-Click->Row Height = 14
  • Select All->Right-Click->Format Cells->Alignment->Wrap text = OFF
  • Page Layout->Gridlines->Print = ON
  • Select the columns up to & including "Where," then Page Layout->Print Area->Set Print Area
  • Page Layout->Scale = 50%
  • Page Layout->Margins->Custom->Top=0.1", all others=0"
  • Page Layout->Print Titles->Sheet->Rows to repeat at top = $1:$1
  • Insert->Header & Footer->Custom Header:
    • Left side = &[Page]/&[Pages]
    • Center = 20xx Playa Events && Art
    • Right side = https://www.justin-klein.com/playaevents-excel-exporter
  • View->Normal
  • View->Freeze Panes->Freeze Top Row
  • Select the top row...
    • Bold
    • Left-align
    • Right-Click->Format Cells->Number->Custom->Type = ddd m-dd
  • Data->Sort->Add a level for each date column, in reverse order (i.e. Mon, Sun, Sat, Fri, ...)
  • Column Widths:
    (Note: Widths render differently on-screen than when printed - if you tweak your widths at all,
    make sure to set them in Normal view, but verify them in View->Page Layout, to make sure they don't spill onto the next page.)
    • Dates = 6.89
    • Title = 17.33
    • Description = 110.86
    • Type = 2.67
    • Camp = 8
    • Where = 5.67
When finished, I suggest printing to PDF as a test run, to verify it comes out as expected (fits on the page, headers are there, first row is repeated, etc
Note: The data changes quite a bit in the weeks leading up to the burn, as camps submit their events & locations. I suggest downloading your final copy as late as possible for the most complete & accurate info.

Previous Years:
Disclaimer: This app is not affiliated with or endorsed by Burning Man Project or Black Rock City LLC.

  130 Responses to “Printable Playa Schedule”

  1. Would it be possible to add a column for the date added. So we can sort by the ones that were added latest

    • You can sort by the ‘Link’ column, which includes a chronological ID number (last added will appear last).

  2. Super useful, Justin. Thanks!

  3. Is there a way to set the settings so it all prints on a 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper?

    • There are *far* too many events to fit them all on one piece of paper – almost 5000 rows. It’ll take ~22 pages front & back.

  4. Is there a 2022 version? Love your work!

    • Hi Sasha,

      Sadly, I didn’t manage to get ahold of a ticket, so my usual excitement to jump on this the instant the events page came online wasn’t quite there as in prior years. Will still do my best to get it up & running one of these weekends though, perhaps a bit later next month, for those of you who were lucky enough 🙂

    • Updated for 2022 🙂

  5. Thanks for doing this each year. Did you find a ticket yet?

  6. When I import the csv file into Excel, many of the Description, especially the really long ones, seem to have tabs in the data which messes up the data import. I can manually fix the csv file, it will take many hours. Do you have an fast way to fix this? In the example below the extra tab or whatever is between “WANTED.” and “We here at”

    “NOW HIRING. DREAM EXPLORERS WANTED. (## breaks at this location ##)
    We here at the Nightcrawlers Corpo

    • disregard my comment, I am going to see if the pre-formatted file will work for me. Thank you so much for putting this together.

    • The descriptions are quoted, so Excel can handle them even if they contain tabs. If it isn’t, then it likely just wasn’t imported with correct settings.

      In any event, glad you got it – pre-formatted is definitely the best way to go if you aren’t that familiar with Excel imports/data manipulation 🙂

  7. Wow thanks for doing this!! Very useful.

  8. Thank you so much for this! I notice that the times in the preformatted spreadsheet match WWW but the times in the .csv appear to be GMT, at least for the handful of events I checked.

    • Looks like the times are correct in the version I downloaded on 8/5, but not in today’s.

    • Looks like they changed the timestamp format returned by their API (& didn’t notify of the change). Fixed.

  9. Thanks again for making this. Do you anticipate a final update for the data by a particular date?

    • Not sure if I’ll have time to do another pre-formatted, but the csv version is updated in realtime, so whenever you download it, it will be current.

    • Thank You! I didn’t notice that the csv was continually updated. Also, thanks for providing the steps that you use to format the csv data.

  10. Thank you for your annual gift to the community! Have you found your ticket yet? Let me know, and I can see if I can be of help.

  11. So playa events say their submission is closed. Can we submit events directly to you?

    • Nope – all this does is provide an alternative presentation for their data, there’s no separate database I maintain.

  12. Since the playa events page is closed, could you update the pre formatted version with the latest data?

    Thank you for your work on this project. This will be my fourth burn and somehow this is the first year that I’ve heard about your gift to the community.

  13. Announcement: I just noticed that the Unofficial Burner Map apparently changed the format of their KML data (sometime during the past few weeks), so camp location lookups were failing & CSVs had almost nothing in the “Where” column.

    Fixed, so if you did any recent downloads, you might want to run them again!

  14. I downloaded the guide on August 11th and was looking through it and noticed a bunch of Tuesday events look like they are scheduled for Wednesday? Might be a bug in the algorithm wanted to bring it to your attention!

    • Yea, bm.org introduced a bug in their api that I have since worked around – if you redownload the current data, it should now be correct.

  15. Thank you very much, Justin! Glad to see that you snagged a ticket in the OMG Sale.

  16. the perfect spreadsheet for me…and the camp.

    I am adding some macros to sort on specific days only. like Friday only events, etc

  17. To the justin-klein.com admin, Thanks for the well-structured and well-presented post!

  18. Hello,

    Love you work! Is 2023 version coming?

  19. 2023 spreadsheets are up. Locations are still a bit spotty, but should fill out as more people submit to unofficialbrcmap.com in the coming weeks.

  20. This is great! Thank you for sharing!

  21. Hi Justin thank you so much for sharing this gift! Is there a certain point when events will stop being updated and we will be good to print, or do you suggest just waiting until the day I am leaving (8/23 for build) to print?

    Thank you thank youuu – Miss Birthday Cake

  22. when something says Monday 12am – 3 am for example…would this be monday morning or monday night ;p

  23. So I made a simplified PDF version of the food events by day and time which can be printed (21 double sided pages). Not sure the best way to share this – but can email it to anyone interested 🙂

  24. BLESS YOU EVER LOVING HEART FOR DOING THIS! I have been using these events spreadsheets since 2016 and I LOVE them. What an incredible gift for nerdy planners like me 🙂 Your work is seen and appreciated. THANK YOU!

  25. Hey Justin – awesome resource, thanks

    I’m looking for the same thing for theme camps and figure it should be a fairly straightforward change in your script, which I can do and ping back to you to include on your site – I’m training up a GPT for Burgins and decent camps data would be a useful input – but couldn’t find you on github, grateful for your help 🙏

    • Hmm – not sure exactly what u mean by “same thing for theme camps?” The spreadsheet output does include a column for camps, no?

      Unfortunately the backend code isn’t really postable/sharable in its current form; it’s gone through a lot of iterations due to various data sources coming & going, & is honestly a bit of a mess, has API keys in it, etc. It’s also not really well-encapsulated from the rest of my site. Would need a good amount of cleanup before I’d be comfortable making it available, but unfortunately I really don’t have the capacity to work on rn. However, u could just use the current output as training data, couldn’t you? Or just pull all the JSON from the official API in one go & throw that into the GPT?

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