Templates
A template gives you a grid. The grid was never the hard part.
Search for a school timetable template and you will find hundreds of spreadsheets: days across the top, periods down the side, colour-coded cells. They are genuinely useful for the thing they do — presenting a finished timetable clearly.
What they cannot do is decide what goes in the cells, which is the entire difficulty. A blank grid is not a head start on a constraint problem; it is a container for one.
Presentation and distribution. Once you know the answer, a clean grid makes it readable for staff, printable for the noticeboard, and shareable with parents. That is worth having, and for a single class or a small tuition centre it may be all you need.
The moment two classes share a teacher. A template holds one class’s week; it has no concept of the same teacher appearing in another sheet at the same time, so nothing prevents you writing them into both. The clash is created silently and found by the teacher.
The same applies to rooms, to specialist facilities, and to anyone working part-time. Every one of those is a constraint the grid cannot represent, so enforcement falls to whoever is holding the pen.
Periods down and days across, not the reverse — it matches how a day is read. One colour per subject, applied consistently, so a pattern is visible without reading. Free periods shown explicitly rather than left blank, because a blank cell is ambiguous between "free" and "not filled in yet".
Separate views for class, teacher and room, generated from the same source. The most common cause of a school running two contradictory timetables is someone maintaining a teacher view by hand alongside the class view.
And a version marker on every printed copy. Timetables change; the ones on staff-room walls do not, unless the version number makes it obvious which is stale.
Count the teachers who teach more than one class, and the rooms used by more than one group. If either number is above zero, a template is a presentation format and not a planning tool — and the planning still has to happen somewhere.
No — deliberately. Handing you an empty grid would not solve the part that is difficult. The demo on this site generates a filled, conflict-free timetable instead, so you can see what a solved grid looks like rather than an empty one.
For a very small one with no shared teachers, yes. The threshold is not school size — it is resource sharing. Two classes sharing one teacher already creates a constraint a spreadsheet cannot enforce for you.
Subject, teacher and room in every cell, free periods marked explicitly, and a version or date stamp so it is obvious when a copy on a wall has been superseded.
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