software to track weekly employee schedule or just a spreadsheet?

[bricker]

I need to track about 24 employees schedule on a weekly basis to know who works when. Many are repetitive from week to week but some vary. I thought about using an Excel spreadsheet, making a template with the repetitive ones and then filling in the variables but wondered if there is anything to run on my iPaq to do a better job of this. Any suggestions will be appreciated.

[bruceo]

I do the exact same thing and I use excel. I have not found anything else that can compare

[bricker]

I was thinking about using Excel but wanted to see if there was anything else made for this that I hadn't heard about. I guess I'll just make a template and then save it as that particular week's schedule.

[davidspalding]

It's a bit complicated, but you could track them all in the Outlook Calendar by using categories. Each person has his/her own category, and on your PDA you can set Calendar to display one or more categories at a time. (Important to remember to switch back to see your own appointments!). On the desktop, with Outlook 2000, the "display only THIS category" function is buried a bit but it can be done. I think you could have multiple views of hte same calendar with different categories shows, but I'm probably wrong.

(Search under my name on this forum, you'll find a thread in which I detail how to display only certain categories in Outlook2k.)

Another option, since spreadsheets are easier to use and maintain for schedule sheets, might be to work in Excel, maybe have copies on your PDA that Pocket Excel can read (one employee per worksheet?) then port them to your PDA (read-only) using Mobipocket's Office companion ($20, free to try for 14 days). I've done a few Word docs and small Excel tables and they were quite readable. A table like a month grid would probably suit you.

P.S.: Great sigline!

[bricker]

Originally posted by davidspalding
It's a bit complicated, but you could track them all in the Outlook Calendar by using categories. Each person has his/her own category, and on your PDA you can set Calendar to display one or more categories at a time. (Important to remember to switch back to see your own appointments!). On the desktop, with Outlook 2000, the "display only THIS category" function is buried a bit but it can be done. I think you could have multiple views of hte same calendar with different categories shows, but I'm probably wrong.

(Search under my name on this forum, you'll find a thread in which I detail how to display only certain categories in Outlook2k.)

Another option, since spreadsheets are easier to use and maintain for schedule sheets, might be to work in Excel, maybe have copies on your PDA that Pocket Excel can read (one employee per worksheet?) then port them to your PDA (read-only) using Mobipocket's Office companion ($20, free to try for 14 days). I've done a few Word docs and small Excel tables and they were quite readable. A table like a month grid would probably suit you.

P.S.: Great sigline!

What I need to do is see on a daily basis who should be in by 9 and who comes in at 10 and will stay late that evening. I really only need to see one day at a time although if I could see the week that would be good also. I have to have something that shows a 7 day view easily which Outlook doesn't do very easily for me. I thought about using Outlook and on each day's calendar page listing the people in 2 batches, early group and late group.

Another thing that would be nice is if I could tap on a name and have the phone number pop up but that's probably asking too much.

Thanks for the compliment on the signature line.