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Over the last couple of months, we have looked at producing statistics using the Office Wizard and then used linked cells in Excel to speed up the publication of output from the Office Wizard. This time, I thought we would look at how you can publish timetables to a word processor application, such as Microsoft Word, using the Office Wizard in CELCAT Timetabler 8.

The key parts in this scenario are the sample “.rtf” templates and “tokens.” CELCAT provides a couple of templates for you to use with the Office Wizard called “default.rtf” and “listing.rtf.”  In their raw state they appear as follows:

Default.rtf (Fig.1)

 

Listing.rtf (Fig.2)

These templates can be used as is and will give you perfectly readable output.  For example, the results from the default.rtf will look something like this:

And the output using listing.rtf output (which could very easily be converted to a CSV file for use in Excel) will look something like this:

Whilst the standard output may be okay, I am sure most of you would prefer to do some customisation, and this is where the tokens come in. You’ll have noticed in Fig.1 and Fig.2, the relevant variable information (the token) is encapsulated within $- and -$. You can reposition, add and remove these tokens as well as change their fonts, colours, add images, etc. to get the output you prefer.

These tokens are categorised into two types:

Non-record Tokens are those positioned outside of the area between the “RecordBegin” and “RecordEnd” tokens.  These will be for data used for a Title, Subtitle, Publication Date, Publishing User, etc. Data that is published just once, either before or after a collection of events, within the document the template is used to create.

Record Tokens are located between the “RecordBegin” and “RecordEnd” tokens in the template rtf file and are processed for each event. These will normally be resource names, start times, end times, etc. This output is repeated for each event in the document the template is used to create.

If you are a CELCAT Timetabler user, you will be able to find the full list of Tokens in the Help Files.  Just open the Office Wizard, click the “Help” button, and scroll down to see the list of tokens (Fig.3).

Finding Timetabler’s Office Wizard’s Help button (Fig.3)

  

In the following 4-minute video, you’ll see changes applied to “default.rtf” to produce a customised template, which I save as “Branded.rtf”, and is then used within the Timetabler’s Office Wizard to create the output (shown in Fig.4) within a Microsoft Word document.

Example of a document created from Timetabler’s Office Wizard (Fig.4)