Schedule Setup

Schedule Setup

Set the time that your office opens, takes lunch, and closes each day. Use the copy/paste/repeat features to quickly fill the actual schedule.  This is very powerful and allows any kind of rotating or alternating schedule by provider, by day of the week and for a specific day of the year. 


Set Up Practice Times 

In the upper left of the Practice-Web Dental screen, click on "Setup." A drop-down menu will open.


Click on "Schedules." The Schedule dialog will appear.


Double-click on the desired time block. The following dialog will appear.


First, select one or more providers (or employees). Click on the "Add" button. The following dialog will appear.


  1. In the "Start Time" field, type in the time that your practice opens
  2. In the "Stop Time" field, type in the time that the lunch break is to start.
  3. Click the "OK" button.
  4. Click on the "Add" button again, the following dialog will open.


  1. In the "Start Time" field, type in the time that your lunch break ends.
  2. In the "Stop Time" field, type in the time that your practice closes.
  3. Click on the "OK" button.
Once the times have been entered for the selected providers for the selected day, the dialog should look as follows.


Repeat this process for each day of the calendar year that the practice is open or the copy and paste method may be used (this is a much faster and easier way to set up the office hours).  

Copy & Paste 

This is the key to the way schedule setup works.  You set up one day the way you like it, and then you copy that day to other days.  This is a two-step process.  First, copy. Then, paste.  There is a clipboard, which is similar in concept to the clipboard used in many other types of programs like word processors.  Even though you can only select a single date, you can then copy either a day or a week to the clipboard. 
Once you have a date or date range on the clipboard, then you can move on to the second step of pasting that date onto other dates. 

In the Paste box, you can either paste once, or paste repeatedly.  Before pasting, select the new date in the main grid that you want to paste to.  You can change the number in the repeat box to be fairly large.  For example, you could paste 365 days, or you could paste 52 weeks.  If you want to clear out multiple weeks, you do not have to repeatedly click the Clear Week button. You can instead go to a blank week, click Copy Week.  Select a different date and perform a Repeat 20.  That would clear out 20 weeks as long as the Replace Existing box was checked.   If you do not check the Replace Existing box when pasting, then whatever you paste will be added to the existing schedule and will not cause any existing schedule items to be deleted. 

As an example, if you have a schedule that alternates weekly, then you might first set up one week the way you like it.  Copy that week and paste it using Repeat 16 to fill approximately 4 months.  Then take one of those weeks and alter it to represent the alternate schedule.  Copy that week to the clipboard.  Then paste single copies of it one at a time to each of the 8 alternating weeks.  This might take about 20 seconds. 

Copy and Paste Example

Click on a day that is already set up, then click on the "Copy Day" button.


  1. Make sure that a checkmark is in "Replace Existing."
  2. In the # field, enter the number of days you want to repeat the schedule. For example, 10 days.
  3. Click on the Repeat button. When done the dialog should look as follows.