The third step in building a schedule is to assign classes to rooms and times. There are two main ways you can assign rooms and times to a class. One is to use the room and time editor in the Class Popup Menu. Another way is to use the drag and drop facilities with the room viewer windows. Using the room and time editor in the class popup menu is in general more difficult and slower then the drag and drop facilities but if there is a strange class time configuration it may be easier to use the editor. We will discuss the drag and drop method here.
In this step you will need the Course Assignments window and at least one room viewer window. To open a room viewer window select View > Room Viewer... from the main menu or click on the appropriate toolbar button. The room viewer should look something like the image below.
The right side should contain a list of all the rooms in your rooms database. The main portion of the window is a weekly time day layout that shows the standard timeslots in your timeslot database. The top line has a menu that allows you to change the insert mode. We will discuss the insert mode options in more detail later but what it represents is the way the courses are dropped into the weekly schedule. So with the setting of timeslot, the course will be dropped into one of the timeslots you have in the timeslot database. In the title bar you will see the current room you are working with and its capacity.
To place a course in a room all you need to do is drag and drop a course from the professor's course list to a timeslot in the room viewer. For example, say we have the following course assignments,
If we drag the Math 201 to our MWF 12:00 slot, the Math 210 to the MWF 10:00 slot, tne Math 155 to the MWF 2:00 slot and the Math 160 to the M 5:30-8:15 slot the assignment window and room windows will look like the following.
The first thing to note is the color scheme on both the room viewer and the assignment lists. The red icons mean that the course has not been allocated at all, the yellow means that the course is partially allocated (Math 201 and 210 are both four-credit courses and they are only assigned three hours each), the darker green means that the course is fully allocated and the light green means that the course is over allocated (Math 160 is a three credit course so it needs to meet 150 minutes per week but 5:30-8:15 is 165 minutes). So when you are creating a schedule and need to know if you are finished you simply scroll down the professor list and if all of the courses are green you are good to go.
There is one other color, blue, that is used when the course does not need to meet the number of contact hours per week. This would be the case with courses like independent studies, student research, internships, ....
To finish allocating the Math 201 and 210 courses, in our example above, we would either want to change the insert mode for the drag and drop or use the room and time editor from the class properties dialog box. If you right click on any course in the room viewer the Class Popup Menu will appear allowing you to change the course properties just like in the professor's course list. Also, if you double-click on the course the course properties box will appear allowing you to change all of the course properties.
If you select the Insert Mode menu at the top of the window the following insert mode options will appear. We will discuss what each of these do below. One thing you will notice when dragging and dropping courses into rooms is that the program will highlight where the course will be dropped as you are moving the mouse. If the drop will create a conflict the highlighting will disappear and the program will not allow you to complete the drop.
