Stopwatch Icon When Adding Appointments

Interruptions are common when working with the Appointment Register. This can cause unexpected behavior, and the user needs to pay attention to warning messages to avoid future problems. But it is not possible to give a warning message about what is perhaps the most common scenario: the user begins to create an appointment and is interrupted before entering the date and time.

S/he gets a phone call and goes to the schedule grid to answer a question from the caller. SYSTOC will think s/he has gone to the schedule to pick a date/time, and the cursor will be a stopwatch to indicate this. The user forgets that s/he was in the middle of creating an appointment and wonders what is "wrong" with SYSTOC. For best results, always save any appointment that is in the process of being added or edited before dealing with the next caller or other interruption. If you always do this, you should avoid most error messages. If you do get an error message, read it carefully. It is trying to keep you from making data entry errors.