Tools|Select rooms manually

In Select rooms manually you can associate the courses and rooms and slots together if you like (or you are forced) to use different rooms for each slot (because of the limited room capacity). Note that you can handle only those courses here that do not have any rooms in their collections. The category for rooms is defined in Category for classrooms in Options|Timetables (by default, category number 3 is used for that purpose).

Alternatively, it is possible to create a new course for each time when the room changes, although other components are same in each time. The preconditions to assign rooms manually (and to have those courses listed in this view) are the following:

1. The course collection should not contain any rooms.
2. Lectures must have been assigned into timetables.

Note that using manual rooms excessively may slow down the processing of the data and it is recommended to use this option as a workaround in situations where creating of course variations with different rooms is too cumbersome. You can also limit the use of manual rooms to selected weeks only. If you can use the same room in all slots of the course, it is always advisable to assign this room permanently to this course. If the course has many lectures and almost all of them use the same room, it is meaningful to create one "classical" course for those lectures and another course for the rest lectures for manual room assignments.

The rooms that are manually associated with slots and courses are active or visible only when printing the timetables, and this selection does not prevent modifying any of the timetables, which are related to them. When this window is invoked, it always first checks the current manual assignments and clears those, which are not current anymore. Therefore, it is a good hint to check all the assignments in this window just before starting to print timetables (and after making the final changes to them).

Click the last column of the grid on the right to view the available rooms for the current slot-course combination and then click the List of available rooms on the bottom left to select the room with this particular course and slot combination. The timetable above this selection refers to the active course and week. Use the View component timetables to inspect the timetables of associated components.

Clear

This button displays a pop-up menu containing three selections to clear the course-slot-room assignments with varying selection criteria:

• Clear current room or [Delete] clears the room from the current slot
• Clear all rooms of this course clears rooms from the slots of the current course
• Clear all rooms from this week clears rooms from all slots of the current week
• Clear all rooms clears rooms from the slots of all weeks and courses

Clone

You can copy rooms from one slot to all slots of the same course or to all courses by imitating the room selections that have been made before.

• Copy room to free slots of this course attempts to assign this room to all free slots of the current course
• Copy room all free slots attempts to assign this room to all free slots
• Imitate current room selections attempts to assign rooms to slots using all previous selections and modifying several courses at once

Capacity

Shows the used capacity of room selections in this view. The maximum capacity is 10921 selections.

Info

Displays the information of the current course in tree form.

Copy

Click this button to copy the table of manual rooms onto the Clipboard with the following column titles:

• week (numeric)
• day of the week (three first letters)
• time-period (numeric)
• course code
• room code

When you have pasted this table on your spreadsheet application, you can then edit the assignments and add new columns for alternative rooms. Note that numbers are used instead of week names and time-period labels, because of the possible automatic formatting of the spreadsheet application.

If you select to also copy all available rooms (expanded list), you will also have the list of all available rooms next to the current room column. When pasting the list of rooms back to the application, you can select from them those rooms that are appropriate.

Paste

Click this button to paste the table you have created above with possible additional columns for room alternatives. All cells are checked for compatibility with the existing data and they are pasted row by row until a feasible room is found, if any. If no room is found, the previous value of the table is kept.

Of course the simplest way is to create the table with this selection, and then modify the room column and possible adding new columns, without changing the first four columns, as in the example below:

On the second row, first the room R237 is attempted to assign, and if it fails, then room R203 is attempted and then finally room R111.

The capacity for manual room assignments is approximately 10,000 slots, which might appear restricted in large institutions. Therefore, manual rooms are recommended to be used only in cases, where assigning of rooms in normal way is difficult.

Filter

If more than one week is scheduled, it is possible to restrict the displayed manual rooms by selecting the first and last week and then to click the Filter button. This clears all slots outside the selected weeks and more capacity is freed for the weeks that are in the current scope and it is easier to find the slots that are of interest. For instance, it is not normally necessary to display manual rooms of slots that are already history.

When you click the List of available rooms, the timetable above is that of the current room and that room is assigned to the active course. When you click the slot-course-room assignment grid on the right, the active timetable is that of the active course (and week selected).

You can sort the list on the right by clicking the topmost (title) row of the appropriate column. The sorting criteria is either time, course or room, and the current sorting order is emphasized.