How do I use Excel for a Univ. level course scheduling tool?

[Guest]

I'm interested to know if others have used Excel as a course/time scheduling
tool at a University department level that shows times, days, instructor,
course overlaps. For instance, several courses are taught at the same time,
but all need to visibly show to identify areas of conflict. The end goal is
to have a grid type of printout that shows all courses, regardless of
recurring times. I've checked some of the other dedicated time scheduling
software applications on the web, but they are too intense to use, and are
not what I'm looking for.

 

[Guest]

Hi,
A visual presentation might not be to hard, but the scheduling part is a
different matter altogether as has already been mentioned.

Thanks,

 

[rgeorgerian]

Greetings,

I had to develop an Excel spreadsheet that closely resembles your
requirements. It was not the easiest thing to do, but this forum and
its archives helped me create what I wanted.

This is used for primarily for conferences and symposiums to plan and
schedule speaker times, workshop, technical sessions and demonstrations
over a 2 to 5 day period. Also, the spreadsheets showed the planning
activities over several months leading up to the event.

A spreadsheet had each of the days broken down in 15 or 20 minute
intervals. A GANTT style chart that showed the specific speaker name
and time. This was to ensure that if a speaker was presenting more than
one paper, I did not schedule him to speak in two different rooms at
the same time. A GANTT style chart that outlined the several months of
planning activities. This gave the overall big picture of things
happening. It is definetly not a replacement for Microsoft Project, but
it does the job.

There are still a few quirky things that I have to do when using the
above as a template on new conferences, but I've learned to live with
them for now.

All this was down via the information from this forum, its archives and
several excellent books on Excel. And most of all persistance.

Hopes this helps.

RichardG