Blocked part of the day

It is of course possible to block any part of the day to any number of objects in the timetable.

However, let's look at this timeoff:

Teacher Einstein can teach the whole week, except for Thursday. But somehow he can teach the 9th lesson on Thursday. In most real life situations this is not what the user wanted to input, so the software reports this as a warning. You can hide it - if Einstein can really teach just that one lessons.

Now imagine that Einstein is teaching 5 Math lessons in 1A and 5 Math lessons in 1B. In the default setting the software will try to put one Math lesson per day in each class. This cannot be achieved because on Thursday there is only one free slot for Math in 1A and Math in 1B.

If the the whole Thursday was correctly blocked, the software would know that Einstein only has 4 days and will generate two math lessons on one day.

So it is worth fixing these little mistakes in timeoffs - they can hurt the generation.

This was very easy example. However if you block several half days to more teachers/subjects, it may be very hard to tell why the timetable doesn't generate.

In that case it is better, if possible, to leave the decision on the software. You can for example tell the software that teacher shall have only 2 days, but the generator can decide which ones:

We have teacher who teaches only 2 days per week and it doesn't matter which

or if you need some free afternoons for your teachers - let the software decide which ones:

Each teacher shall have one or two free afternoon

The software allows you to input many similar constraints. In general, initially try to input only the timeoffs for the teachers that are essential. Once you generate initial timetable you can try to please other teachers. But if you input everything at the start, the timetable might not exist and you will not know why.

Note:
- on some schools it might be worth considering this:
I want to have 1+1+1+2 OR 1+2+2 lessons per week.