Help needed to build the correct prompt - time and schedules

Prompting
1

Hey all. I work for a university and am trying to create a white space report that looks at all the offered sections and the rooms they are in and then spits out the open rooms by time or meeting pattern. I can’t get 4.0 to complete this for me, it continues to struggle with the time and time formatting. I am trying to test to see where it is failing and it seems like it is not processing the times correct. For reference my source doc is an excel with a start time column and end time column for each section. Any help on how to prompt this?

2

Hi and welcome to the Forum!

I created a simplified example on my end to take a look at this issue…
The problem appears to relate to how the time is formatted in your Excel sheet. I used am/pm time convention in my example.

See the snapshot here for the formatting.

image

For the prompt, I used the following:

Your role is to assist with room planning for a university. The university has four rooms - Room A, Room B, Room C, Room D - in which it runs meetings from 10am to 5pm every day. The specific schedule including the meeting and room allocation are detailed in the attached file. Your task is to identify during which of the operating hours the rooms have remaining capacity for other activities. In your response you list the available times by room. Let’s approach it step by step.

With this set-up, I was able to get consistently correct answers.

Response

Based on the provided schedule, here are the available times for each room between the operating hours of 10:00 am and 5:00 pm:

Room A:

  • 11:00 am to 1:00 pm
  • 2:30 pm to 5:00 pm

Room B:

  • 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm
  • 3:30 pm to 4:00 pm

Room C:

  • 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm
  • 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm

Room D:

  • 10:00 am to 4:00 pm

These are the times during which each room is free and can be used for other activities.

I am guessing your data and example is a bit more complex than that but hopefully this will give you an additional idea on how to approach it.

P.S.: Note that I made the assumption that you were using the ChatGPT interface. Let me know if you used the API and I can take a second look at it.