How to Change the Scheduler Settings
Scheduler settings decide how the board looks and behaves for you: which hours of the day it shows, how big each cell is, what colours the appointments, and whether it refreshes on its own. Open it with the Scheduler settings button, the cog in the Scheduler's toolbar, beside Refresh.
How do I open and save the Scheduler settings?
Select Scheduler settings, the cog button in the Scheduler's toolbar, make your changes in the dialog, and select Apply. Nothing changes on the board until you select Apply.
- Select Scheduler settings in the toolbar.
- Change the Working day, Cell duration, Colour by or Auto-refresh.
- Select Apply to use them, or Cancel to leave everything as it was.
Reset to defaults puts every choice in the dialog back to how the Scheduler comes: a working day of 08:00 to 18:00, a Cell duration of 1 h, Colour by Call type, and Auto-refresh Off. Select Apply afterwards to use them. Pressing Escape, selecting Close, or clicking outside the dialog is the same as Cancel.
Selecting Apply also closes any appointment card you had open. Your settings are yours alone and do not change the board for anybody else. They are remembered with the board's layout: a layout you save keeps them, and while the star (★) in the Layouts control is on Last Used Layout, which is where it starts, the Scheduler opens with them next time.
How do I change the working hours shown on the Scheduler?
Open Scheduler settings and choose the start and end of the Working day from the two lists, then select Apply. The day and week views then show only those hours of each day, which saves you scrolling through the night.
The start can be any hour from 00:00 to 14:00, and the end any hour from 10:00 to 24:00. The end is always at least an hour after the start: a start picked later than that is held one hour before the end, and an end picked earlier is held one hour after the start. The chosen hours are shown beside the heading.
The working day changes only what the board shows, not when anybody works. Keep in mind:
- A visit wholly outside the working day is not drawn in the Day, Work week and Week views. Widen the working day, or use the Month view, which places visits by day whatever their time, to see it.
- A visit that runs past either end is drawn up to the edge, with an arrow showing that it carries on.
- Slots you mark out for a new call stay inside the working day.
- The cells start from the start of the working day, so a working day starting at 07:00 with 2-hour cells has lines at 07:00, 09:00, 11:00 and so on. If the day does not divide evenly into cells, its last cell is shorter.
What does Cell duration do on the Scheduler?
Cell duration, in Scheduler settings, sets how much time each cell of the Scheduler board stands for: 30 min, 1 h, 2 h, 4 h or 5 h. Every cell is drawn the same width, so it works like a zoom: 30 min spreads the day out for close work, and 4 h or 5 h fits a whole working day on screen.
The cell size also sets how finely you place visits:
- A dragged appointment snaps to the nearest cell line.
- A pulled edge snaps to the nearest cell line, and an appointment is never shorter than one cell.
- The arrow keys move an appointment by one cell.
- A marked-out slot for a new call covers whole cells.
So choose 30 min when you need to book to the half hour, and a larger cell when you want the overview. At the larger sizes a short visit becomes a thin coloured sliver with no words and no edges to pull; click it to open its card, or use the keyboard to change its length. The hour labels along the top of the board show one label at the start of each cell, so you can always see where a visit can land.
How do I change what colours the appointments on the Scheduler?
Open Scheduler settings, choose one of the four Colour by buttons, and select Apply. Every appointment then takes the colour of its item in that list:
- Call type — the call's type. This is where the Scheduler starts.
- Call status — the whole call's status.
- Action status — where this engineer's visit has got to.
- Engineer — the engineer's own colour, the same colour as their initials beside their name.
The colours themselves are the ones set against each item in the filter rail: the coloured square beside each call type, status or engineer. Change a colour there and every appointment in that colour changes at once. An item has a colour of its own even before anybody has chosen one.
The footer's colour key names the list the board is coloured by and its most common items on screen. Whatever you colour by, a done or cancelled visit still has the customer's name struck through, and its status dot still says how far it has got.
How do I make the Scheduler refresh on its own?
Open Scheduler settings, choose an interval under Auto-refresh, and select Apply. The board then reads every engineer's visits again at that interval, so bookings and moves made by other people appear without you selecting Refresh.
The choices are Off, Every minute, Every 5 minutes, Every 10 minutes and Every 30 minutes. The Scheduler starts with Off.
An automatic refresh keeps your place on the board, just like selecting Refresh. It also reads the To schedule column again while that column is open.
Why is there no setting for recorded start and end times?
The Scheduler places every visit by its due date and its duration, and this version of ABM Service offers no way to place visits by the times an engineer actually recorded. So Scheduler settings has no choice for it, and moving or resizing a visit never changes the times the engineer recorded.
The date button in the toolbar reads Due as a reminder of this.
To see when an engineer actually started and finished a visit, use the Calls list instead of the Scheduler: its Started and Ended columns, shown beside Due when the list opens, give the times the engineer recorded. Each of those column headings also has a filter button of its own, for example to find the visits that started on a particular day.