Academic Calendar

Problems importing the same timetable update file twice.

You may have been directed to this page because a problem occurred while processing updated timetable data.

How ACal deals with timetable data

When the timetable is imported a copy is created in ACal’s own internal format. It is saved as a data table (Timetable) within the file ACalManagerData.xml.

When an updated version of the timetable is imported ACal creates a second timetable data table in its own format (Timetable2). It compares this with the Timetable data table which it updates to show the changes and the action (Add, Delete or Change) that will be required to update the Outlook appointments. Once the appointments have been created, or the new data files sent to colleagues, the Update Action records are cleared from ACal’s main Timetable data table which now matches the updated school timetable.

Why does ACal think there are no updates?

If the same updated timetable file is imported a second time there will be no difference between the Timetable data table and Timetable2 because timetable has already been updated. ACal will report that there are no updates. This could be a problem if, for some reason, the Update Actions have not yet been completed to update the Outlook calendars. ACal has effectively lost its records of the Update Actions needed and cannot recreate them using the data it now has. If this happens then once ACal has processed the newly imported data it will notify you that there is a problem and direct you to this web page.

The way to get around this is to reload the original data then load the updated data. (If you are using ACal version 4.0.13.00 or later it will have kept a copy of each timetable file you imported in the ACal data folder to guard against the situation where the original import file is no longer available and to make it easy to send the relevant files to Greenhill Software for technical support.)

Start the Manage Many Calendars wizard to Create Appointments and click the Next button until you see the timetable data displayed. If you now click the Back button ACal will ask if you want to discard the currently held timetable data and load fresh data. Click Yes. If you