Time Slots
Build the per-day grid of time blocks your program runs in — generate a default grid from your venue hours, add or edit slots manually, pin the ones you want to protect, and clear the rest.
Purpose
The Time Slots sub-tab defines the time blocks (keynote, parallel, poster, panel, tutorial, workshop, break, lunch, social) that sessions get placed into. Slots are grouped by day and sorted by start time. You can auto-generate a full grid from your venue working hours, edit slots individually, pin slots so bulk operations skip them, and clear everything unpinned in one click.
When you use it
Use this sub-tab after your venue and default room sizes are set, and before running the session planner — the planner needs slots to place sessions into. Come back whenever the daily schedule shape changes.
Walkthrough
- 1
Open the Conference Leadership Console, select your conference, open the Presentation System tab, and click the Time Slots sub-tab.
- 2
Click Generate default grid to auto-fill slots for every conference day from your venue working hours in slot-length increments. Review the confirmation (it shows the hours and increment) and confirm. Re-running is safe — slots with the same date/start/end are not duplicated.
- 3
To add a slot by hand, click Add slot, choose the date, start and end times, a kind, and an optional label, then click Save. (Set the conference start date in Setup first if prompted.)
- 4
Edit any slot with its Edit button, or delete it with the trash icon and confirm.
- 5
Click the pushpin icon on a slot to pin it. Pinned slots are protected from Clear unpinned.
- 6
Use Clear unpinned to drop every unpinned slot at once — handy for regenerating the grid after changing your venue defaults.
If two slots on the same day overlap, a warning banner appears and the affected rows are highlighted. The system lets you keep them — review and fix overlaps before you run the planner. Deleting a slot unassigns any sessions placed in it.
Tips
- Generate the grid first, then fine-tune — it's faster than building every slot by hand.
- Pin the slots you've hand-tuned (opening plenary, banquet block) before using Clear unpinned so a regenerate doesn't wipe them.
- The first write here auto-creates a draft Session Plan, so the Session Plan sub-tab has something to point at.
- Configure the venue first — Generate is disabled until a venue with working hours exists.