A guide for schedule managers, showing them how to clone (copy) shifts.
Shifts and whole Shift Patterns can be quickly copied to future days and weeks using the ShiftApp shift cloning feature.
When you hover over a shift, the popup "Shift Details" box appears, and the "Actions" line contains the "Clone" and "Full Clone" controls. These controls each have "down arrow" icon to represent them.
If you click, hold, and drag down, on these controls, you can copy a shift onto a day in the future.
Release the mouse button to drop the cloned shift when the target day is highlighted in green color below the cloned shift.
All details of the original shift are cloned, except for the date.
Use "Full Clone", with the solid arrow icon, to clone a shift with copies of its assignments.
Or use "Clone", with the outline arrow icon, to clone only the shift details, without copying the assignments, to a new day.
You can clone a complete days shift pattern by using the clone icons that appear next to the Day row date header. Drag the shifts to a new day and then release the mouse button.
After starting with just one day, you can very quickly plan a whole week of shifts.
After switching to ‘Month’ view at the top of the schedule, you can clone a shift forward one or more weeks,
or, you can clone a whole week of shifts at a time.
It's also possible to clone just the shifts for a given employee, client or resource by first filtering the schedule view.
Using these techniques, you can quickly create shifts and fill them with employee assignments for the days and weeks ahead.
We recommend using a large high-resolution screen for planning and scheduling large workforces with many shifts.
When viewing multiple schedules, you can clone all schedules at once,
or you can clone just a single schedule by first viewing that single schedule.
Instead of using "click and drag" on the various clone controls, you can just immediately click on the clone control to bring up a "Clone Shift" Dialog.
Using the "Clone Shift" Dialog, you can copy shifts to a different schedule, or to a date far in the future.
Businesses that have a shift pattern that changes every week, might like to use Shift Cloning to quickly populate their schedule and then make changes and adjustments.
Businesses having a more regular shift pattern can use the ShiftApp "Repeating Shift" feature. Please see the short video lesson about "Repeating Shifts" for further details.
Thank You.
Learn more about ShiftApp, see all the videos in the Video Library