Selectvacation.htm

BidPlus has provided you with some very handy Vacation bidding tools. These tools allow you to quickly find the lines that will either extend your vacation, or get you the most vacation pay possible, ...or both!

Start on the Criteria Selection screen. To begin, click on the 'Tools' button at the bottom.

This will open up the Configure dialog box. You will see the Vacation button there at the bottom. Simply click on it to open the Vacation dialog box.

You can also get directly to the Vacation dialog box by clicking on the 'Palm Tree' button in the button bar at the top.

In this example, the dialog box is already filled in. The information used here is your exact vacation duration, including any partial days which are indicated in hours. Now click OK. You will then see the Vacation line displayed in green on your calendar.

The next step is to enter one basic criterion to use for a search. The reason for this is that even though you have entered your vacation information, you have not yet selected any criterion by which to search. You must give the program something to search for . Your vacation duration alone is not a criterion that can be searched for.

This is what you need to do. As described in the Criteria Selection section, make the first criteria selection statement read "1 hour Credit Time (Min)".

You have now selected a criterion to search by. Since all LOFs in the bid package contain at least 1 hour of credit time, then when you search, the result is that every line will be included in the search. This is how you include the entire bid package in your search.

(At this point we should tell you that you are certainly able to add more than this one criterion. But this would only result in fewer lines in your search. Remember, the more criteria you add, the fewer lines result from your search!)

The next thing to do is indicate in what order you would like the resulting lines from your search to be displayed. As described in the Editing Section on how to arrange your LOFs , change the line arrangement statement on the left of the criteria statements from 'Line Number' to 'Vac Extend - Total':

(Hint: To do this, click directly on the word 'Line Number', and then scroll and select 'Vac. Extend - Total' in the drop box. Click here for details.)

Now you are ready to Search. Click the Search button at the bottom left.

According to the criteria of '1 hour credit time (Min)', your search will include every LOF in the bid package. And according to the line arrangement of 'Vac. Extend - Total', all of those lines will be displayed in order of Vacation extension from most to least. Now you can click on the View button at the bottom to get to the Review and Edit screen.

This is an example of one of the first lines that will be displayed. Even though the line number is 633, it is in the 1st Bid Position because it extends the vaction the most. All of the IDs in this line happen to fall in the vacation, and are now green to indicate this fact. So this line will give you the entire month off. As you scroll through the remaining lines, you will see that the lines are indeed arranged in order of vacation extension from most to least.

You also have the ability to have the lines arranged in order of extension to the left or right, as well as by your vacation pay, or by any of several other line arrangement choices.

There are a couple of restrictions that you should keep in mind. First, you are only able to address a single vacation period in the month. BidPlus is not currently able to process 2 vacations in the same month. Second, if your vacation extend into the following month, BidPlus will only consider the part of the vacation that is in the bidding month. However, if your vacation goes right up to the end of the month with an overlapping ID, BidPlus will pull that ID back into the bid month and properly calculate the pay for that ID.

Due to the fact that you are including the entire bid package in the search in this circumstance, the process of searching will take quite a bit longer then usual. Please do not be alrmed. This is normal. If you are bidding in ORD, for example, the search may take as long as 1 full minute as it arranges well over 1000 lines while calculating your vacation pay at the same time. But still, this is much faster then the several days it would take you to do the same thing by hand!!