New to fet, how long to get organised?

[Sue Moran]

I have been looking into learning to use fet and so am a complete novice. My manager wants to know how long it would take for me to set up a timetable and begin experimenting with the software. Can anyone give me an estimate. We are a 3 - 18 school we have approximately 68 teachers, 620 students, 31 classes. Thanks for your time

[Volker Dirr]

Difficult to say, because we need to know much more.
Also depends also on how you enter the data. If you can import it from your school administration software, you will need best best case only a few hours.
If you need to enter manually and there are not difficult students structures or constraints. Maybe 1 to 3 days.
If you don't know much about timetables or if you also need to do course planning. Then you will need longer. Difficult to say. It depends also very much on your logical cleverness. From a few days up to a few weeks. If you are not clever enough or if there are to many "special" rules, you will maybe never solve the problem with FET.

[ChicagoPianoTuner]

Hi Sue,

I was a complete novice with FET as of this past spring.  I had never done any timetabling, but others in my school were largely responsible for the course planning side of things (determining which teachers teach which subjects, how frequently subjects meet, etc.).  I would say it took me a 3-5 hours to actually understand how FET works.  The documentation section of the website is very helpful, particularly Volker's guide (http://timetabling.de/manual/FET-manual.en.html).  The best way to learn is by rolling up your sleeves, so to speak.

After I figured out how FET works, it took me maybe three hours to enter all teachers, rooms, and student groups, and to create all "activities," which is a word that has a very specific meaning in FET.

Then, the hard part: tweaking your timetable until it is good enough.  Of course, being good enough is subjective.  I would say it easily took me 100 hours to achieve what I feel is a perfect timetable for my school, but I was exceptionally picky.  You can probably see that many of the posts on the front page of this subforum were mine!

That, of course, leads me to my last point: Liviu and Volker are both incredibly supportive and often respond to forum posts within five minutes. 

Good luck!

[Sue Moran]

Thanks, thats useful. I had a play with it during the Christmas holidays and got help very easily then too, now its the summer and I have time to get to grips. I am quite logical and am looking forward to giving it a go.