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 and selected course categories 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.

Manual room selection is initially planned as a workaround. When it is used as it was intened (to handle exceptions), it is often practical and adds flexibility to room assignment, but when used for the most of the courses, it may cause more problems than it solves.

Restrictions: If the assignments of the courses in the timetables are changed after rooms have been assigned manually, manual room selections are not kept in sync; therefore this tools should be mainly used after assignments into the timetables have been done.

In an ideal case, as many lectures as possible should have fixed rooms (rooms attached as components), which could solve many problems.

The problem from the Mimosa point of view is that the application does not know beforehand, what users want to do with their courses and from the user’s point of view it is sometimes hard to define the location of the lectures in the timetables before free room is ensured and vice versa.

• Case 1: Suppose you have a course “Distant learning” or “Talent training” with lots of lectures assigned into timetables, but you are not going to add any room to it (because it is not needed). Since Mimosa cannot know that you are not going to attach any rooms to it, it will be automatically listed in Manual rooms selection and eat up its limited capacity.
• Solution 1: Create new “fake rooms” for those courses (with blank names if you like) and add them to courses and they will disappear from the list.
• Case 2: Suppose you have a course of 500 lectures, and you can easily assign 90% of the lectuers into one room, but others have to be assigned separately.
• Solution 2: In this case it is advisable to split the course in two parts: a) course with 450 lectures with a fixed room and b) course with 50 lectures without fixed room. Sometimes you can split a course into two parts, each part having their own fixed room. Clicking the Capacity button will try to change manual room selection into courses with a fixed room if you are used the same room in all slots. This will also help reduce the lectures that have to be assigned to rooms manually.

Note also that assigning rooms manually extensively slows down the performance in Timetables view. If you have created special courses with a large number of lectures having only one component and you have not assigned any fixed room(s) for them (since they are not needed), they are automatically listed in this view. Since this is not the purpose, it is recommended to create and add "fake rooms" for each of those courses in order rule them out of this view.

It is possible to restrict the total displayed number of manually selected rooms in two ways and both of them can be used simultaneously:

1. Week restriction: If Mimosa file contains several weeks, it is possible to select the First week and Last week, which are included in this view. Manual room assignments which are outside this range are cleared. Users normally select here the range according to the week number they are currently processing.

2. Exclude course categories enables to exclude courses by their categories from this view. Typically excluded courses are those which are not going to have any room, for instance when the course takes place outside own premises. If special courses without rooms have been assigned into timetables and it is not the purpose to assign any room to them, it is a good idea to create and use a special category for them and then exclude that category here.

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

Imitate

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. With these tools you can speed up room assignment considerably, since you can assign only some sample lectures and then let the application select the accepted rooms for each course accordingly.

• Copy this room to free slots of this course attempts to assign this room to all free slots of the current course
• Copy this 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

This button shows the used capacity of room selections in this view. The maximum capacity is 10921 selections. Click this option to view if there are any changes to replace manual rooms by a fixed room in order to simplify your room assignment task. If you have used the same manually assigned room for some course, you are suggested to replace it by a fixed room (if it is possible) and remove the course from this list. If you have used the capacity excessively, you are also prompted to reduce the number of manually selected rooms. In this case the gauge on the bottom of the screen is (which measures the number of manually selected rooms) is coloured red instead of blue.

The application starts to search for courses to be eliminated from this list. If a course of this kind is found, you are prompted to accept the room replacement (answer [Yes]), or search for the next one (answer [No]). If you want to to stop the process, click [Cancel] and if you accept all replacements found, click [All].

When no replacements have been found or you cancel the process, the number of new and old items plus the number of reduced items is displayed:

Info

Displays the information of the current course in tree form, see Course info.

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.

If more than one week is to be scheduled, it is possible to restrict the selected manual rooms by selecting the first and last week. Changing the week range clears all manual room assignments outside the selected week range 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 assign rooms manually for 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.