Many of the patrols use Google Sheets as a shared rota. There is a Sheet for each patrol, the Sheet URLs are given to patrol members.
At the start of the season, please -
- Check that you appear on the Contact tab for the correct rotas. Please get in touch with the Patrol Manager if you are not listed. New toaders will only be listed once they have been trained - the patrol manager will contact them to arrange training.
- Check that your Phone number is correcttly listed on the Contact tab, preferably your mobile. The number is needed for the first shift to ring the second shift to tell them whether they need to come out or not. Please let the Manager know if you would prefer not to share your phone number with other patrol members.
Each week
The rota for the next week will be made available on the previous Friday, the shift start times will be shown at the top left corner of the sheet. The times get about 10 minutes later each week.
The smaller rotas are prepopulated with the names of the patrollers. At the larger patrols you will need to select your name from a drop down list, this avoids having a very long rota that is hard to use on a mobile.
Please show your availability by entering one of the following letters -
- L - Leader (one person per evening, who will take the first shift). The Leader volunteers to take responsibility for cancelling the second shift if not needed. The leader will take the contact numbers for other members who are available on the night and call them if more help is needed for a toad rush.
- Y - you will go out on the shift
- A - you are available if needed for a toad rush
Links to the Rotas
- The emails sent out by Google Groups have links to the Rotas that are in the form - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/edit?usp=sharing . This link will open the sheet at the first current tab (week) and it is ok to bookmark the link.
- If you bookmark a specific week then you will save a link that has gid=1111 or similar at the end and if you use that link in future then you will revert to the historic week and make that week avaialble after it has been hidden. The easy thing to do is to bookmark the Contact tab because that link is constant.
Using the rota on a mobile or tablet
It is easiest to edit the rota on a browser running on a laptop or desktop, If you want to use a mobile device then you need to install the Google Sheets app for the device in order to edit - you can view without the app. There are links at the bottom of the page at https://www.google.co.uk/sheets/about/ to download the app.
You can Clear the contents of a cell by selecting the cell and then touching on the cell, a popup menu will appear -