Merging school timetables

Timetablers working in campus school face unique timetabling challenges, e.g. they need to create a timetable for elementary and middle school and at the same time some teachers and classrooms may be shared in both schools. One option is to create a single combined timetable for all schools, but it has some obvious drawbacks: e.g. how to print separate timetables or share such combined timetable with students and teachers. It seems that a better option is to work on two separate timetables and then merge them in order to find out if there are any conflicts with shared teachers or classrooms.

Merging two timetables in Prime Timetable is easy:

• Open base timetable
• Choose Owl > Open > Merge Timetable
• Select the other timetable and click Merge.

What will happen in the merging process? If there is already a day, teacher, room, class or subject with the same name in the base timetable, it will be used as it is; otherwise, it will be added. Periods are going to be merged based on the intervals. Furthermore, all lessons from the second timetable will be added to the base timetable.

After merging, conflicts for shared teachers and classrooms can be easily spotted in the teacher and room views, so that the timetabler can fix them. This is where instant timetable validation helps tremendously.

Hey, that's all for now! Let us know if merging timetables suit your needs.