Real time timetables allow you to answer the question 'Where should a given pupil or member of staff be at a particular time?' by bringing timetabled lessons, timetable exceptions and activities together in one timetable, based on actual hours of the day rather than timetable periods. There are also real time timetables for rooms, allowing room bookings to be recorded in SchoolBase.

Firstly make sure the term dates are correct. You can access the Term Dates form from the calendar menu. 

Next use the .Net Timetable Menu to check & set up Periods, Period Sets & Week dates. Periods will already be set up if the timetable has been in use at all. You need to check that the Week column is correct. This will default to 1 throughout, which is correct if you have a 1 week timetable. If you have a 2 week timetable, change this to 2 for those periods in the 2nd week.

Press the Period Sets button to go to the form to set up the start & finish times of your timetable periods. Type in a name for your period set, set the default length of your lessons, then let the tab key do the work. All you need do is set the start of each working day, and alter the time to account for breaks & different length periods, the rest is done for you when you press Tab.

Having created a period set, it needs to be applied to pupil types. Go to Support Functions, Timetable variables, and press 'Pupil/staff specific timetable settings' to get to the Pupil Types table. Here you need to fill in the Period Time Set column towards the right.

One last thing to check before you can see a real-time timetable for a pupil, which is the week sets from the Periods table.

For schools with a one-week timetable it is enough to go in here to make sure that weeks are populated, and all set to Week 1. If you have a two week timetable you need to drop down to let the system know which weeks are week 2. There is also a 'Not in School' item on the list to use for holidays. Now you can view real time timetables for pupils by going to pupil finder, functions 'View Real Time' button.

To view staff real time timetables, first go to staff records and make sure members of staff have 'Attached to' set in the school tab. This is how the system knows which period set to use when displaying their timetable. Then real time can be displayed using the staff finder, functions tab.

Lastly, to use real time for rooms, please go to the buildings lookup table to set a pupil type for buildings, which will be used for the real time timetable of all the rooms in that building.

Room real time timetables are found in Timetable Reports, Rooms tab.

The real time timetables above are the kind of default output you could expect when first setting up the real time timeatble, but it can do so much more!

You can highlight particular subjects by adding colours (defined using the Subject Colours button from Timetable Variables) and will bring together timetable exceptions and activities in the same view as your standard timetable. In the example below I have simply added one timetable exception (English support) and one activity (violin) and used colour to highlight them by way of an example. It's also worth pointing out that the pink bars on the timetable show when 'now' is, using your computer system settings to get the current date and time, so you can instantly identify the wherabouts of a pupil.