Tip: Scheduling Resource Availability

[John Sindelar]

Often you don't just want to record the appointments for a resource, but also the availability of that resource. There are a number of ways to do this in SeedCode Calendar Pro.

One approach would create a new appointment "type" called "Available". This type is color coded "rose" in our example below.



You'd the create appointments of thus type for each of your resources indicating when they are available. You can take advantage of our repeating events engine to make this very quick, easily creating even complicated work schedules as a series of repeating appointments. (Check out these tips on how to create intricate work schedules using repeating events.)

Once these availability records are created its simply a matter of scheduling appointments for that resource within the rectangles representing their availability:



(Screen shots are taken from the Scheduling tab of the Pro calendar.)

Note that in the example above we've set the calendar not to show conflicts since all of these appointments would conflict with the availability record behind them. (Of course you can edit the conflict relationship so that items need to be of the same type to conflict-- a very useful change that allows you to keep conflicts "on" in the sample above and make sure that items of different statuses--say "pending" or "unconfirmed" don't conflict with things like "confirmed".)

Another approach would be to create a second "fake" resource for each of your real resources. These "fake" resources would just be used to record the resource's availability. While this reduces the number of real resources you can see at once, it does let you record notes about the availability and lets you keep the conflict display "on".



Note that in this example we've named our resources so the "Avail." resource comes before "Visits". (Resources are displayed in alphabetical order within each resource type.) We've also added a conflicting appointment at 9:45am to show what conflicts would look like here.

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John Sindelar
SeedCode LLC