A hall is one room the school can teach in. Halls is the short list behind the room selector on the timetable: a name and a capacity per row, no more than that. Every slot you place on the weekly calendar points at one of these rows, which is how Ekati can tell you that room 4 is already taken on Tuesday at 10:00.

The secretary normally owns this screen, and fills it in once — at the start of the year, or when a new building wing opens. It is deliberately tiny. A school has perhaps eight to twenty teachable spaces, and the value of the screen depends entirely on everyone using the same names, so “Salle 4”, “Labo SVT” and “Préau” beat “Room A”, “Biology Lab” and “Yard” by a wide margin.

One convenience is worth knowing about: when you create a class stream, Ekati creates a hall of the same name for you automatically, with a default capacity of 30. So a school that names its rooms after its classes never has to type this screen at all.

Capacity is a planning figure, not a guard rail

Ekati uses capacity for what a capacity is good for: showing it at a glance, and keeping it in front of the person moving 45 learners into a room that holds 30. What it does not do is refuse a class that is too large for the room. A slot placed in a room of 20 for a stream of 35 saves perfectly happily, because the clash check is about who is double-booked, not about how many bodies arrive.

So treat it as the number that makes the mistake obvious to a human rather than one that prevents it. If the figure is right and up to date, a secretary glancing at the timetable can see the problem at a glance. If it is out of date — a room extended with extra benches, a class moved into the library — the number quietly protects no one.

Keep it equal to what the room actually holds

The useful discipline is to set capacity to the number of learners the room is legally and comfortably supposed to take, and to update it when the room changes. A science laboratory with fixed benches does not gain capacity by removing a table, and a covered playground that floods in the rainy season may hold fewer learners in November than in January.

Rename for the people who will read it

The name is what appears on the timetable, in the room selector and on printed timetables handed to parents. Name rooms the way your school already says them out loud — “Salle des Sixthes”, “Labo Physique”, “Préau” — and a substitute teacher covering on a Friday will find the right room without asking. Avoid names that differ only by a letter; in a printed timetable at column width, “Salle 1” and “Salle 11” are a mistake waiting to happen.

Creating a class stream creates its room

When you add a class in Academic > Classes, Ekati automatically creates a hall with the same name and a capacity of 30. Most schools find this exactly right: the room is named after the class that sits in it, and there is nothing to type. If you prefer to name rooms by building instead — “Bloc A Salle 2” — edit the auto-created hall’s name once and future classes will need the same minute of attention.

Bulk tools for a long list

When you are entering twenty rooms at the start of a year, tick the rows and use the table’s duplicate action to copy a row, then edit the copy; or use the bulk delete to clear a list you are rebuilding from scratch. Both save typing on a screen whose only job is to be short and correct.

Editing in place

A hall’s name and capacity can be corrected straight from the table without opening a dialog — click the cell, change it, and it is saved. That matters after term one, when the school has learned which room actually works for which class and the list needs tidying rather than rebuilding.

Halls do not delete what depends on them

A room attached to timetable slots stays attached: remove the room from those slots first if you really are closing it. Renaming is always safe, because the slots keep referring to the same row. Deleting a room out from under a booked week leaves lessons with nowhere to be, which is why renaming is the habit to reach for and deleting is not.