Timetables is the calendar a school runs on. Each block of coloured time on it is a real lesson slot: a course, a class, a teacher, a room, and the hours it happens. Everything else in the school hangs off that decision — the execution logbooks, the attendance, the room bookings, and the parents’ idea of what “pick-up at four” means.

Open Scheduling > Timetables and you are looking at a week with Monday on the left. The secretary builds it, because it is a document with a hundred versions in someone’s drawer; the head of school reviews it before it is published; teachers read it to know where to be. The page also accepts dragging a lesson to a new time, so a fire drill or a visiting lecturer is a two-second fix rather than a rewrite.

Two rules keep the week honest, and the screen enforces both for you. A room, a teacher and a class cannot be in two places at once — if they are, the slot is refused with the reason named. And the timetable is the single source of the logbook: a teacher’s execution logbook is verified against the slots on this calendar, so a timetable that is wrong produces a logbook that is wrong.

A recurring slot is a rule, not a promise

A slot anchored to a weekday is a rule: mathematics, first year, every Tuesday at 08:00 in room 4. It shows on every week of the period you are viewing, and it is what most of a school timetable is made of. When you set one, you are making a decision about the whole term rather than about next Tuesday, which is why the repeat dates exist and why a change to a recurring slot changes every week it appears in.

A dated slot is a single event

A slot anchored to a concrete date happens once. A visiting lecturer on Thursday, a make-up class before the examination, a sports afternoon that displaces three lessons. It appears on one week of the calendar only, and it is checked for clashes against the other slots on that same day rather than against the whole term.

Using both without a clash

Both kinds live side by side on the same calendar, and Ekati checks the overlap the right way for each: two dated slots can coexist a week apart without any question, while a dated slot landing on top of a recurring one is caught immediately. In practice this means you can build the term on recurring slots and then drop in the exceptions, rather than typing forty dated sessions by hand.

Moving a lesson is a drag

Drag a block to another day or hour and it follows you, saving as it goes. This is the practical escape hatch for the week when something moves — but note that a drag moves one slot. A recurring lesson that should shift for the rest of the term is better handled by opening it, changing the time, and saving: that is what keeps every week consistent instead of leaving seven slightly different Tuesdays behind.

The filter drawer is how you answer a question

The tuning-fork button in the toolbar opens Filters & Actions: a Period date range, then Group, Course, Teacher and Hall. Each one narrows the calendar, and because they combine, “Mathematics, second year, Ms Ngo, room 2” gives you the six slots that actually concern you instead of three hundred that do not. Clear a filter and the rest of the week comes back.

The Period field decides how much you see

Period is the range of dates the calendar covers, and it is also what the PDF and image exports respect. Set it to a single week before you print a timetable for a classroom wall, and to the whole term when you print the master copy for the secretary’s drawer.

Clicking a lesson opens its topics

Click any block and the drawer shows that slot’s details and the course topics scheduled into it, grouped by module and lesson. That is where you attach a lesson to a particular week of the course, so a class is not told to “get to module 3” when module 3 is not due for another six weeks. A slot with no modules listed says so plainly.

Three ways out, all from the same drawer

PDF produces a printable grid for the wall or the file. Image produces a picture instead, which is what you paste into a message to parents or a notice in the staff room. Send distributes the timetable to the people concerned through Ekati’s messaging. All three respect the filters and the period you have set, so narrow first and print second.

A hall cannot host two lessons at once

If room 2 is already taken at 10:00, the new slot is refused and the hall is named. This is the check that saves a school the most embarrassment, because a double-booked room is discovered in front of forty learners rather than in a spreadsheet the week before.

A teacher cannot be in two rooms at once

The same rule applies to staff. A clash means the teacher has been booked for another course at that moment, which catches the commonest planning error in a school: building a timetable per class without ever checking the teacher across all of them.

End time must be after start time

A slot that ends when it starts, or before, is refused outright. It sounds trivial and it is the single most common thing you will mistype, because most timetables are copied from a paper one where the end time is implied. Thirty seconds of checking now beats a term of a teacher arriving to an empty room.

Deleting is deliberate

Removing a slot asks for confirmation by name, and says plainly that it cannot be undone. Because the logbook is verified against this calendar, deleting a lesson removes a slot that teachers may already have logged hours against — so confirm before you confirm.