Selecting Your Days On & Off
(Click here to read some important notes about selecting days on & off.)

You are easily able to select your days on and off using the BidPlus program. You may select them in any combination that you like. But remember, you must be realistic about your selections. The program is extremely accurate and will only search for exactly what you ask for.

To select a day off, simply point at it and click once. The day will turn red. You may select as many as you like. (The day that is green is indicating a holiday.) Then you can click the Search button at the bottom. After the search, click on the View button at the bottom and you will be shown all of the lines that contain your particular request for days off.

To select a day on, simply point and then double click on the desired day(s). Those days will turn blue.

You may also select them in any combination that you like.

To reset the day back to normal, simply click on it once. It will turn back to black.

If you are trying to find lines that have a certain day on/off pattern, such as a 3 on 4 off, it is best if you try clicking just the first set of days on and off in that sequence as opposed to trying to select everything all the way through the month. Occasionally a 1 day trip may be thrown in, and that will cause that line to not be inlcuded in the seach results even though it would be a likely candidate. The more specific you get with your request, the less number of lines there will be that fit exactly what you have asked for.

Be sure to check out the Day Expansion Feature  as well as how to select additional criteria .

**Please Note**

Occasionally you are going to run into trips that arrive after midnight, causing some confusion as to whether a 2 day is really a one day, or a 3 day is really a 2 day, how does it effect selecting days off, etc.

As many of you are aware, you can enter criteria such as latest return. So if you enter 2100 to be your latest return, that means that you will accept everything that arrives between 0001 and 2100. But wait!! You don’t want any after midnight arrivals, so what do you do??

If you look closely, you will also see a criterion that allows you to enter the Earliest Return. So in addition to stating the latest arrival your will accept, you can also enter something like “All of my line to have 0800 as the earliest arrival”.

This indicates to the program that you will not display any arrivals between the hours of 0001 and 0800. Now you don’t need to worry about those trips that get in after midnight.

But be aware! The opposite is also true! If you say that you want mostly 2 day trips, then any trips that arrive after midnight will still be considered 3 day trips to the computer, and therefore won’t be included in your search. So you will need to add an additional criterion or do a subsequent search in another Bank for any 3 day trips as well. Only this time you can use a variation  of the criteria example above. When you look for these 2 day trips (which the computer considers to be 3 day trips because they get in after midnight), be sure to enter something like 0400 to be your latest arrival. This way it will only include those 2 day trips that get in after midnight, but not the traditional 3 day, 3 duty period trips that you really aren’t interested in. With a little experimentation, we believe that the concept will begin to be more useful to you.

One last thing to consider. Look at this graphic again.

If, on the Criteria Selection screen, you would have clicked on the 4th to make it a day off, you would not have seen this line because ID 1233 overlaps onto the 4th. The computer considers it a day on for selection purposes. You should not select it as either a day on or off. You should instead click on it once with the right mouse button and use the Day Expansion feature, which allows you to apply certain criteria to one specific day. You could then make the Day Expansion criteria say "Latest Return - 0200" for the 4th. That way, any trips that get in after midnight, and overlap onto the 4th, would still be selected while preserving your day off on the 4th.

Also notice that the number of days off displayed for this line is 17. In this case, the 4th is considered a day off in terms of counting days off, but not in terms of selecting criteria because of the overlap. Remember, computers are absolute in their ability to make a determination.