A10

Has anyone else come across the NFER PISA 2012 main survey system? I've just been handed a USB drive and manual for this survey software that we will be supposedly undertaking in September. I don't think I've ever see such a suspicious set of instructions. Basically we are supposed to run the software on this USB drive on each of the computers that will be used in the survey to confirm they meet the specifications and then return the drive to NFER. I don't know what everyone elses opinion is, but personally I dislike this kind of approach - let me tell you if we meet your specifications, and if I'm wrong then it's my fault. As part of this process you are also obliged to run their virus checker - their own notes state that the schools own antivirus will detect this as a virus ... 'This is normal and should be ignored'. Yeah right! All the information that is gathered by this process is written back to the USB drive as a Truecrypt encrypted file. So there is no way we can see what information has been gathered. Again - why is this necessary? On the testing day the students will need to "log in to the computer as a user with administrative rights" WTF??? Is there any school stupid enough to think this is a good idea? They do say that "if there are security concerns about having students logged into computers with full administrative rights..." Am I alone in thinking that not one bit of this process is acceptable - or even professional? Of course, as is usual with schools, we are under pressure to just do this regardless.

Excellent work. I don't do VBA, but I've been trying to play with this. I had a few thoughts on how to improve it, however I've had no success so far. I'm hoping someone with some experience might be able to help: Presumably all lessons are the same length. So instead of filling in the J column of the spread sheet, you could replace the 'End' statement and variables with a 'Duration=' statement. Also I'd guess that a duration of 00:59:59 would prevent any clashes ' Start' can be used as 'Start= "date" & " " & "time". My idea was to have column J just have the start times of each lesson. If you then had a list of dates for the Mondays in your week A cycle it would be possible to get the script to step through the dates filling in each week and allowing for holidays. A separate spreadsheet with the Monday week B dates and you could do a 2 week timetable for the whole year easily. We need a method to prevent this adding a blank event where there is nothing timetabled. I'm guessing some sort of IF ="" THEN statement... There are lots of potential uses for this. I'm looking to use the Room Mailbox feature in Ms Exchange to produce automated room bookings