Shift Scheduler

Description

Automatically create and maintain your organization's schedule in a single spreadsheet that automatically creates Google Calendar events for your users, as well as creates and maintains a separate call schedule to immediately see who's covering what responsibilities.

Designed by a family medicine Chief Resident with medical residencies in mind (but flexible enough to be used by almost anyone with complex scheduling needs), this shift scheduling application simplifies the process of creating and maintaining complex schedules for even large numbers of people. At the first run, you simply define various shifts that your users work in the "Setup" tab. You have the option of assigning each shift a location, start and end time, and call schedule designation. The program then creates and maintains the other tabs based on your user definitions, as well as a google calendar for each user you defined.

Then, when you then assign your users their shifts in the "Shift Schedule" tab, the program will use the shift information you've already supplied it to create google calendar events for your users. It first attempts to match the shift name with the list of shifts you supplied in the Setup tab, and if one matches it creates the google calendar event with the supplied start and end time, location, etc. If what you type in doesn't match any pre-defined shift, it will create an All Day event in the google calendar for your user instead. You can even type in a custom event with it's own times, for example "1 PM - 4:30 PM Meeting" and it will create an event based on those times. You can create multiple events in the same day by separating them with a forward slash "/" or a comma ",".

You can even define and create shifts by color - simply shade the shift definition box in the Setup tab and type in the name you'd like to show up, and when you color in a user's Shift Schedule day with that color it will create an event with the name you've selected (in my residency we used this for background responsibilities, such as carrying the Peds pager, which happened while you were doing other scheduled tasks).

Finally, the program creates and maintains an automatic Call Schedule, so that for the important shifts in your organization you can see at a glance who is covering. In the setup tab, define one (or more, separated by commas) optional call definition to your shift. Then when your user is assigned to that shift, his or her name will populate into the call schedule. The program maintains this in real time as the shifts are added and edited in the Shift Schedule tab.

The program will automatically create and maintain a separate google calendar for each user, which will be primarily editable by the account that this add on is installed from, but should be shared with each user's account so they can access their schedule easily from their phone or computer. The program is smart enough that you can manually create other calendar events in each user's calendar if you want and the program will leave them alone. However, the program is designed to act as if the spreadsheet is the primary source of scheduling information, and any changes made directly in the google calendar will not automatically populate in the scheduling spreadsheet.

My residency program is now using this as its primary scheduling resource - I hope you find some use for it as well!