News

The 2023 versions of Holiday Scheduler are now available.
Send an e-mail to sales@mtis-ltd.co.uk to order a copy.

In some instances when customers have installed Windows 10 and Office 2013 they have found that the macros in Holiday Scheduler have been disabled and in one instance removed. A way of avoiding this is to make the folder in which you keep Holiday Scheduler a “Trusted Location”.
You can do this in “Excel Options” under “Trust Centre”.
The location of “Excel Options” varies depending on which version of Office is being used. In Excel 2007 click on the Office logo and it is at the bottom of the drop down box. In Excel 2010 and 2013 left click on “File” it is at the bottom below Help.

Up until recently copies of the Holiday Scheduler could be downloaded from the website for potential customers to carry out a free trial. This required the storing of all versions of Holiday Scheduler on the internet. To ensure none of these copies had been tampered with each one contained a digital signature.

We have now adopted a new policy of inviting prospective customers to request a trial copy. This means we no longer need to store copies of the scheduler on the internet. From the beginning of January all copies of the Holiday Scheduler will no longer contain a digital signature. This should have no effect on almost all customers. If however you have a security arrangement that looks for a digital signature you may need to make MTIS a “trusted source”

One feature that has been added to the days based Holiday Scheduler is the refreshing of the formulae in each cell of “Individual Calendars”.
When you go to “Individual Calendars” a piece of code will copy the formulae from a hidden sheet and replace the formulae in the “Individual Calendars” page. If there have been any changes you will be asked “Do you wish to replace the contents of the destination cells?” You should answer yes.
This automatically alleviates the problem of people erroneously entering data into this sheet.

When one of our customers installed Office 2013 on one of their PCs they suddenly could no longer get the Holiday Scheduler to function. Thanks to some investigative work by Chris Quick of Crusade Computer Solutions it was discovered that in Excel 2013 there is a limit to the number of characters in the file name. If you go above  31 characters the file will not function properly and any macros will be disabled.

At MTIS we will re-name the 2014 files with shorter names to help avoid this becoming a problem.

The recent experiences of two Holiday Scheduler customers demonstrate the importance of backing up your files.
The experience of the first customer was that he managed to overwrite his current staff holiday planner with the original blank file whilst moving some old files from his laptop. Unfortunately he stored the file in a location that was not routinely backed up. All the data was lost and he had to go back through his records and rebuild the holiday records. There are two lessons in this. The first is to regularly back up your files and the second is to rename the file once you have stated to use it.

The second experience was a customer that gave complete access to the Holiday Scheduler to all staff. Unfortunately one member of staff, not quite knowing what they were doing put a password protection on the workbook and then forgot the password. The file was totally locked. Fortunately they did keep the file in a location that was backed up. They were able to restore the file with only a small amount of data needing re-entering. The second lesson here is to only give read access to the majority of staff and modifying access to those that administer the file.

For a free download of our staff holiday planner, visit the Holiday Scheduler Download page.

One thing that we have discovered over the years is that customers are not always aware or have forgotten some of the useful features of Holiday Scheduler.
Therefore in this blog we will occasionally describe some of these features.

Password Protection
If you wish only certain people to modify the holiday scheduler yet want all staff to see it you can set a password for modifying. Select “Save-as”, “Tools”, “General Options” you will then be given two boxes where you can enter passwords for modifying and for viewing.

Add Comments
Add comments to an entry in the calendar. The calendar pages of the Holiday Scheduler are protected but not with a password. This means that if you wish to use some Excel features you can do so by simply selecting “Tools”, “Protection”, “Un-protect Sheet”. You can then for example add a comment to a cell by selecting “Insert”, “Comment”. To put the protection back on the sheet simply select “Apply Colours” (If you use Excel 2007 or later please select “Review”, “Un-protect Sheet”, “New Comment”)

The order in which employees are displayed in each of the monthly sheets can be changed. By clicking on the title “Name” the list is sorted in alphabetical order, by clicking on “Department” the departments are sorted alphabetically and by clicking on “Reset” it is ordered as it is in the “Input Names” sheet. What some users may be unaware of is that the sort order of the December sheet determines the order of the selection boxes in the “Individual Calendars” and “Individual Reports”