Every school has the same September job, and almost every school does it the same way: one enormous spreadsheet, copied 39 times, edited by hand.
The room timetable is not complicated. It is one grid — rooms across, periods down — that repeats every week, with a letter on it if the school runs a two-week cycle, and holidays punched out of it. What makes it miserable is the copying. Thirty-nine sheets, each of which has to say the right date and the right week letter, and each of which somebody has to fix again when the INSET day moves.
So we pulled the timetable engine out of Monospace and gave it away.
Monospace Timetable is a free program that does exactly that job. There is no account. There is no server. Nothing is uploaded, because there is nothing to upload it to.
Get it
Two files, built from the same code in the same job, on the releases page:
https://github.com/camwooloo/Monospace-Timetable/releases/latest
timetable.html is one file. Download it, double-click it, it opens in your browser. Windows, Mac, a Chromebook — anything with a browser. Nothing installed, no admin rights, and it works with the network unplugged.
timetable.exe is a portable Windows app. Not an installer, nothing in your registry, runs from a USB stick or a network share, and updates itself.
If you are in a school and IT locks down executables: use the .html. It does the same job and needs nobody's permission.
Five things, in order
Down the left-hand side, in the order they depend on each other.
Year — the first and last day, and whether you run a one, two or three week cycle. Closed — holidays, INSET days, bank holidays. Day — your periods and breaks, with their times, or without them if your school labels periods rather than clocking them. Rooms — the codes that become the printed columns, and any facts you want printed underneath: No of PCs, Teacher, Telephone. Grid — the standing timetable, typed straight in.
Then Export, and you have the workbook.
If you have never done this before
There is a walkthrough. Ten steps, Next and Back, and each step takes you to the screen it is talking about and points at the control you need — so you are doing it as you read rather than reading it all first and then trying to remember.
Each step also says whether that part is finished yet, and which three are optional. Closures, one-off week changes and the colour are all things you can export a perfectly good workbook without, and it says so, because the worst thing a setup guide can do is send somebody looking for work that is not there.
It offers itself the first time you open the app, and it lives in the rail under Guide afterwards — which is where it is in August when somebody new picks this up.
What comes out
One workbook holding every week of the year, plus a tab for each cycle-week template and a half-term overview.
Sheet tabs are colour-coded so you can see at a glance which week is which. Every class code keeps the same colour everywhere it appears, so a room's Tuesday reads at arm's length. Day blocks alternate and break rows are drawn across, so a week reads as a week rather than as a wall of cells.
Four switches, each of which tells you what it does and what it costs:
- Weeks follow the templates — edit a template in Excel and every week using it fills in.
- Hide ended weeks — finished weeks are hidden, never deleted.
- Protect the templates — the standing timetable becomes read-only.
- Lock the timetabled lessons — staff can fill in free periods and nothing else.
All four are off by default, so if you never open that panel you get the plain workbook.
Your file is a file
Save writes a small .json wherever you choose. Put it on a shared drive and anybody can open it. Next year starts from it rather than from a blank page.
The app also keeps a copy in your browser so a closed tab does not cost you an afternoon — but that is a courtesy, not a save. It lives in one browser profile on one machine, and "clear browsing data" takes it. The app says so, in those words, rather than letting you find out.
It is genuinely free, and genuinely yours
AGPL-3.0. Free to use, free to change, free to share. There is no licence key, no seat count, no trial, and nothing expires. A school can run it for ever without ever talking to us, and that is the intended outcome rather than a lead-generation strategy that has not started yet.
The source is on GitHub, and the app carries a link to it on every screen.
One honest warning: Windows will say "Windows protected your PC" when you run the .exe. That is because it is not code-signed — a certificate costs several hundred pounds a year and this is free. Click More info, then Run anyway. Before you do, check you downloaded it from the releases page yourself rather than from a link somebody emailed you. If that is a problem, the .html has none of it.
And if you do use Monospace
The file this tool saves is the same file Monospace reads and writes, both ways.
A school already using Monospace can take a year out of it, open it here and build the workbook on a laptop with no login. A school that starts here — types the whole year in, gets its spreadsheet, and later wants the rest — can load that year straight into Monospace without typing any of it twice.
That is the only thing this tool has to do with the paid product, and it is a door rather than a wall. Monospace is an all-in-one project management app that happens to suit schools very well: departments with their own boards, tasks, notes and tickets, a helpdesk staff raise tickets into, an asset register for everything the school owns, and the booking rota this timetable feeds. If the generator is useful to you, that probably is too.
If it is not, the generator is still yours.
Limits
The same ones the engine has everywhere: a cycle of one, two or three weeks, up to twenty rows in a school day, twenty rooms on a printed sheet with eight fact rows beneath them, two hundred closures, and a year of up to 400 days. It holds as many years as you like in one file — that cap belongs to Monospace, not to this.
It builds the workbook on your own machine, so a big year with a password on it takes a few seconds. The button says so while it works.
Availability
Free, for everybody, for ever. No Monospace account required and no plan involved — it is a separate program, not a feature of a tier.