FAQ 306: How do I book holidays in the diary?

[William]

Let’s say for example that a member of staff if going on holiday for a week. Here are a couple of different methods of booking this into the diary.

[METHOD 1] Blocking out the Holiday with a ‘Quick Appointment’

This is the recommended method of booking holidays or time off. This provides a very clear visual indication that the person is on holiday and will also provide a clear warnings if a user tries to book an appointment which clashes with the holiday.

• Go to the Appointment Diary
• Navigate to the first date of the holiday in the relevant staff member’s diary
• Click on a time slot at the start of the day (e.g. 8:00am), and while holding the left mouse button, drag the mouse down to the end of the day (e.g. 6:00pm) to select the whole day (release the mouse button)
• Press the SPACE BAR (on the keyboard)
• A Quick Appointment window will appear, enter ‘Holiday’ (or whatever description is appropriate) and click OK

You will now see that you have created an appointment which blocks out the whole day. This method is useful for blocking out a single day (like a ‘Day Off’ or a ‘Bank Holiday’), but what if we need to block out more than one day? There are two options :-

(i) Copy and Paste (use this if you’re only blocking out a couple of days)* Right-click the ‘Holiday’ appointment and click Copy

• Navigate to the next day of the holiday
• Right-click on a slot at the start of the day (e.g. 8:00am) and click Paste
• Repeat the above for each additional day of the holiday

(ii) Recur the Appointment (use this if you’re blocking out more days)

• Double-click the ‘Holiday’ appointment to open it in the Appointment Editor
• Under Dates and Times, click the Recurrence… button
  The Appointment Recurrence window pops up and defaults to a daily recurrence pattern (so we don’t need change that)
• Under Range of recurrence at the bottom, check the starting date is correct and tick the End By option and enter the date when the holiday will be finishing
• Press OK then Save and Close the appointment

Whether you used the Copy & Paste method or the Recurring method, the end result should be the same. The holiday will now be clearly blocked out in the staff member’s diary.

[METHOD 2] Booking an All Day Appointment

This method books a single appointment which spans the whole period when the staff member is unavailable. If you try to book another appointment which clashes with the ‘holiday’ appointment, then you’ll get a clash warning which informs the user exactly why the staff member is unavailable.

• Go to the Appointment Diary
• Navigate to the first date of the holiday in the relevant staff member’s diary
• Double-click in the ‘All Day’ slot in the diary (at the top of the day, immediately beneath the date)
• In the Appointment Editor, under Dates and Times, select the starting and the ending dates for the holiday
• At the top of the Appointment Editor, untick the box Auto Description and type in ‘Holiday’ (or whatever description is appropriate)
• Click Save and Close
• You may get a message warning you of working outside the hours, simply click Yes

You will see that at the very top of the Diary, there is a new ‘All Day’ appointment with the description that you gave it. This is probably the quickest method of creating a ‘Holiday’ appointment in the diary, but the downside is that ‘All Day’ appointments only appear at the top of the diary, so it does not visually ‘blank out’ the whole day as unavailable.

Please note that this article can also be applied to blocking out other clinic events in the diary, such as a ‘Bank Holiday’, ‘Staff Training’, ‘Clinic Closed’ etc.

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