Calendar view gives you the whole period in one picture. Your people run down the left, the days run across the top, and every square tells you what is happening for that person on that day. It is where you start a planning session, because it is also how you choose which days you want to open and work on.
Reading a square
Four things can appear in a square. The legend sits above the grid and shows all four.
|
What you see |
What it means |
|---|---|
|
A grey line along the bottom of the square |
This person has at least one planning or appointment that day. No line means the day is empty. |
|
A short coloured bar near the top |
The person has a workday registration that day, for example holiday, sickness or a course. The colour is the one set for that registration type, and hovering shows its name. An ordinary working day has no bar. |
|
A pink dot in the top right corner |
Something changed on that day since the screen was loaded, either from an optimisation or from your own edits. Days you have not touched stay clean. |
|
A pink bar with a check mark across the middle |
The day is open in Route view. |
Weekends and days already in the past have a grey background, so a week reads correctly at a glance without you counting columns.
Opening the days you want to work on
Click a square and that person's day opens in Route view. Click it again and it closes. The counter on the Route view tab tells you how many days you currently have open, so you always know how much you are looking at.
To take several at once, press the mouse down and drag:
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Drag sideways to take a run of days for one person, for example Monday to Friday for a single technician.
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Drag up or down to take the same day for several people, for example everybody's Wednesday.
The square you start on decides what happens. Start on a closed day and you open the whole run. Start on an open day and you close it. Squares that are already in the state you are dragging towards are left alone, so you cannot accidentally toggle half a row back the other way.
Opening fewer days makes the rest of the screen easier to work with. Most planners open one person's week, or one day across the whole team, rather than everything at once.
How to use it in practice
At the start of a session
Look for the days with no bottom line. Those are the people and days with nothing planned, and they are usually where you want the optimisation to put work. Then open the days you intend to look at.
After running auto-plan
Come back to Calendar view and read the pink dots. They mark every person and day the run touched, so you can see the reach of the change before you commit to it. If dots appear on days you did not expect to be involved, check those routes before you save.
When somebody is away
The coloured bars tell you who is not available before you plan, not after. A week with three coloured bars in it is a week where the algorithm has less room than you think.
Getting the colours to mean something
The colours come from your workday registration types, which are set up centrally in Microbizz rather than in Tourplanning+. If your registration types have no colours, or several of them share one colour, the calendar cannot tell holiday from sickness from a course, and the bars stop being useful. Giving each type a distinct colour is a five minute job that pays for itself every week.
Checking that it is working
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Give somebody a planning on a day that was empty. The bottom line appears on that square.
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Register a holiday for somebody. The coloured bar appears, and hovering shows the name of the registration type.
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Run auto-plan. Dots appear on exactly the people and days that changed, and nowhere else.
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Open five days by dragging, and the Route view counter reads five.
The grid stays empty until you have picked a team. If you see nothing at all, that is the first thing to check.