For a Service schedule that deals with dozens of resources and that receives dozens of new jobs or appointments every day, readability and user-friendly browsing of the schedule are essential.
For this purpose, Direct Planning Service features a set of tools to ease browsing and editing the schedule.
Browsing the schedule
Time scales
Direct Planning offers 5 time scales that let you view from one day to several weeks at a glance. The zoom level of these time scales can be customized.
Mouse-scrolling and keyboard shortcuts
To quickly move within the schedule, you would often scroll using the mouse wheel and the many keyboard shortcuts. Here are a few examples of keyboard shortcuts:
- Go to the current date
- Go to the selected
Global browsing
Global browsing displays a miniature version of the schedule. Clicking in this window enables quick access to a given date.
Highlighting jobs
Job highlighting is a very convenient feature of Direct Planning Service. It lets you visually highlight a set of jobs that meet a given criterion in the schedule. Jobs that don’t meet this criterion are grayed out.
A few examples:
- Jobs of the same customer
- Jobs of the same participant
- Jobs with alert
It is then possible to very quickly browse among the highlighted jobs. Best for browsing the jobs or appointments of the same customer.
Direct Planning Service – Highlighting the reservations of a speaker
Filtering jobs
In the same spirit as the highlighting that grays out jobs not meeting a criterion, the “Filter” feature enables removing them from the current display. Thus, only the jobs meeting the selected criterion remain on screen.
Direct Planning Service – Filtering the reservations of a speaker
Editing a schedule: some common actions
Rescheduling a job
The “Reschedule” feature is very useful in every day’s life. For example, it takes one click to reschedule a job or an appointment in 24 hours, in one week or on a given date.
Duplicating a job
The “Duplicate” feature lets you easily duplicate an appointment or a job on a given date.
Changing resource
Changing resource is very easy to perform in Direct Planning Service. You can simply move a job onto another resource with a drag-and-drop or edit a resource from within the job details.