Automatically create and maintain your organization's schedule in a single spreadsheet that automatically creates Google Calendar events for your users, as well as creates and maintains separate a separate spreadsheet view reorganizing your schedule by shift, to immediately see who's covering what responsibilities.

Designed by a family medicine Chief Resident with medical residencies in mind (but flexible enough to be used by anyone with complex scheduling needs), this shift scheduling application simplifies the process of creating and maintaining complex schedules for even large numbers of people. At the first run, an example spreadsheet is created to demonstrate how the program works. A tutorial guides you through customizing that spreadsheet to your specific users, and the program will open a sidebar in which you'll have the option of defining several attributes of commonly worked shifts (each can have a start and end time, custom location, as well as several other advanced properties). With that, setup is complete and you're ready to schedule!

Then, when you then assign shifts to your users (either by assigning a shift to their name in the "User View" tab or by assigning their name to a shift in the "Shift View" tab), the program will use the shift information you've already supplied it to create google calendar events for your users (and synchronize with the other spreadsheet view to keep everything up to date)! 

If you assign a user a shift name which doesn't match one of the specially defined shifts you've set up in the sidebar, the program will create an All Day event in the google calendar for your user instead. You can even type in a custom event with it's own times -- for example "1-4:30 Meeting" -- and it will create a calendar event based on those times. You can create multiple events in the same day by separating them with a forward slash "/" or a comma ",". 

There are lots of advanced options and features too, but if you're not interested by now I don't think they'll convince you. Check it out for yourself! You can always access a more detailed summary of information within the program by opening the help or tutorial views from the menu.

My residency program is now using this as its primary scheduling resource - I hope you find some use for it as well!