How can I have different session times on different days of the week?

In many schools and colleges each day of the week follows the same patern of session times, but in some different days of the week have different session times. 

Academic Calendar can cope with this if you make a few simple extra entries when you enter your session times in the Setup pages..

The example below shows how the session times have been set up for a school which has the same sessions on every day of the week up to Period 5.  On Friday the school finishes early.  There is no Period 6.  The school day always ends with a period called Registration and Reading Time (RRT).  On Friday this starts at 2:25 PM while on every other day it starts at 3:15 PM.

This information is given to Acadmic Calendar by adding square brackets at the start of the Name of any session that does not occur every day.  Inside the sqaure brackets are single letters for the days of the week on which the session occurs (but Th for Thursday).  So Period 6 has [MTWTh] in front of the name to indicate that it occurs on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

The row below has an entry of [F]RRT which shows that the Registration & Reading Time period on Friday starts at 2:25 PM while the row below shows that on the other days of the week it starts at 3:5 PM.

Clicking on the Timetable tab of the setup pages shows that these day codes have been implemented.

Here you can see that Period 6 is not available on Friday.  It has a grey background and you can not make entries in it.  There are two rows for RRT, one for the earlier Friday time and one for the later time on the other days of the week.

Two-week timetables

If you have a two-week timetable things may be more complex if you have any session times in Week 2 that are different to those for Week 1.

To cater for the simplest situation where the session times are thsame in both weeks simply leave the tick box to the right of the grid ticked.  (This box will not be visible if you do not have two week timetabling activated.)

If you do have different session times in the two weeks then use lower case letters to represent Week 2 in your codes.

For example, a code of [MTWthf] would indicate that the session took place on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday in Week 1 but on Thursday and Friday in Week 2.

New Appointments

In Outlook's calendar view, when you click on a timetabled day to make an appointment, Academic Calendar uses this information to prepare the Session Times panel appropriately.  Below are view of two appointment windows.  The one on the left is for a Thursday and so has Period 6 in the Session Times panel while the one on the right is for Friday and does not.

Thursday	Friday