Comprehensive guide free school timetable software 2023

In this article, I will provide a Comprehensive guide to free school timetable software tutorial 2023. I have already written a detailed post about timetable software in MS Excel. But due to some technical glitches, many people facing problems in generating timetables using that Excel software.

So here I found free software that allows generating a timetable for your school, college, institute, or any other scheduling organization.

In this article, I will discuss some important constraints and provide you with a comprehensive guide to apply them.

Introduction to free school timetable software

Generating a timetable for any institute is a very difficult and time-consuming task. Manually a timetable requires many efforts to generate an efficient timetable for the institute. So here I have one option I used for my Institute and helped management to develop a timetable. So here we go!

FET is free software for automatically scheduling the timetable of a school, high-school or university. It uses a fast and efficient timetabling algorithm and is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 or later. It is able to solve a complicated timetable in 5-20 minutes for simpler timetables, and up to hours for extremely difficult timetables.

I have used fet time table software. The full form of FET is Fast and Efficient TimeTable. The latest version of FET is fet 6.9.0.

Follow this link to download fet timetable software:

The interface of free school timetable software

After downloading FET timetable software you will get the interface looks as follows:

The interface contains menus as follows:

1. File – Contains options such as New, Open, Open Recent, Mode, Save, Save As, Import, Export, and Quit. It is generally used for creating a new file, opening an existing file, opening a recent file, saving data, importing data from CSV or XML files, and exporting data into CSV or XML files.
2. Data – Contains options such as Institute and Information, Terms, Day and Hours, Subjects, Activity Tags, Teachers, Students, and constraints such as time and space. This menu is generally used to fill in the data and information for the institute.
3. Statistics – Contains options such as Teachers, Students, Subjects, Activities, and other statistics.
4. Advanced – Contains options such as Activity planning, Spread the activities evenly over the week, removing redundant constraints and group activities in the initial order of generation etc.
5. Timetable – Contains options such as Generate New, View (Teachers), View (Stduents), Soft Conflicts, Lock and Unlock activities, Print, Save data and timetable as etc.
6. Settings – It contains various settings including interface, font, HTML output file etc.
7. Help – It displays the help menu

Similarly, you can find a few buttons on the start-up screen of FET as shown in the screenshot.

Entering Data for free school timetable software – FET

Now let’s start with how to enter data. Observe the below-given data as I have entered data for my timetable.

Enter basic details

Add Students

In this option, I have added my classes such VI A, VI B, VI C etc.

Add Activities

This is a very important step in timetable making. It adds periods for various classes. Here you can add weekly periods for a specific teacher, subject, and class. Observe the screenshots:

a) Select the Teacher name and click to add

b) Select the Subject taught by a teacher

c) Add no. of periods per week, If no. of periods is more than no. days of the week add activities in different splits.

For example – We have weekly 7 periods for English so it can be added by splitting 6+1, 5+2, 4+3, etc.

The duration option allows selecting consecutive periods for a subject.

Min days allow a keeping period after n days. I have 3 HPE (Games) Periods weekly and I want it should be assigned alternate days, min day should 2.

d) Select the class and click to add it.

Constraints

I have used a few important constraints to develop a balanced timetable for my school. They are as follows:

Generating Timetable

Before generating a new timetable, change the output directory from the settings menu. Follow the given steps to change the directory.

Click on Settings -> Select the output directory -> Select the folder where you want save the timetable

After doing this now it’s time to generate it. Ensure all activities and Click on Timetable-> Generate new.

It will open a window to generate a new timetable window. Click the Start button and FET starts the process. Finally, it generates a dialog box as follows:

Making a PDF of the result timetable output

After Generation successful message, the timetable will be saved in the output directory->timetables folder which you set earlier. FET saves the file in HTML format.

You will get the files as follows in that folder:

Find and Open Index.html file which looks like as follows:

If you want to make a PDF for statistics open the link given in front of statistics and make them PDF.

You can use Years -> Days Horizontal for making PDF for a class and for teacher’s copy Teachers -> Days Horizontal.

To make a PDF for the output file do a small change in .css file for proper format. Copy the following code:

table {
  text-align: center;
  page-break-inside: avoid;
  width:95%;
  margin-top:0.2;
  margin-left:0.3;
  margin:right:0.2;
}

tr
{
line-height:25px;
}

Now find the .css file from the output directory and open it. Find the highlighted code in the below-given screenshot.

Earlier I have also published one article regarding time table excel software. Following this link to have a review:

Now select the highlighted code and delete it. Paste the copied code.

Now open the HTML file and Press ctrl + p. Select Save as PDF. Choose your destination folder and that’s Done!!