The panel is too cramped on a small screen

That column never drops below a quarter of the panel’s width, and on a normal booking screen it takes about a third. Everything the room actually has to say — its name, its status, the buttons somebody came to press — is squeezed into what is left.

Turn on The timeline area is collapsed by default, the last switch on the configuration’s Design page. The column folds into a narrow tap rail, and the content pane widens from roughly two-thirds of the screen to nearly all of it.

Know what folds away with it. The clock survives, turned on its side in the rail, but the language button, the announcements and the control bar go with the schedule. The booking’s own times are not lost — they move into the left pane while the column is folded.

Anybody at the panel taps the rail to open it, and a chevron on its edge folds it back by hand. Left alone it re-folds itself after three minutes without a touch, so a panel somebody opened at nine is not still open at noon.

The Design page carries a switch for each thing the panel can draw, and they arrive on: Show Organizer — with its own title and staff ID nested underneath — Show attendees, Show user thumbnail, Show amenities and capacity, Show Online Meeting Logo, Show announcements and Show company logo. Each is a line the panel has to find room for whether or not anybody reads it.

Two of them cost more than their size suggests:

• Text size set to Large rather than Maximize holds the room’s name at a fixed size instead of letting it take the space it is given, which on a small panel is how a long room name pushes everything below it down.
• Show QR Code for booking, over on the Function page, pins a card to the corner of the content pane and reserves its width permanently. The action buttons then wrap onto a second row as soon as there are more than about three of them.

The Function page’s own button switches are the same trade — Show extend button, Show other rooms button, Show report issue button and their neighbours each cost a button’s worth of row. Turning off the ones your rooms genuinely do not use buys back more room than any single Design switch.

A configuration is shared, so this is not a choice you have to make for the whole estate: leave the panels with space to spare on the configuration they are on, and give the small ones one of their own.

Left alone the column covers all 24 hours, so the working day occupies a third of it and every booking in it is a thin band.

The timeline displays business hours only, immediately above the collapse switch on the Design page, narrows it to the hours the room is open, with an hour or two of padding either side.

This one depends on something outside the panel: the resource has to have business hours set. With none there is nothing to narrow to, and the switch changes nothing at all — which is how it gets reported as broken. Set the hours on the room first, the same ones that limit booking to business hours.

Scale, in the manager console on the panel itself, magnifies the whole interface on that one device. At 1.5 a screen that used to fit stops fitting, and because everything grows together it reads as a layout fault rather than a zoom.

It is set on the device and not in the configuration, so this is the cause to suspect when one panel is cramped and an identical one beside it is not. Open the manager console on the panel and put Scale back to 1.

On the smallest Qbic models the choice stops at 1.5 instead of going up to 3 — worth noticing, because it means the device already treats itself as a tight screen.

At 560 pixels wide or narrower, or under 480 tall, the panel stops drawing the standard layout and switches to a compact one: a single column, one thing at a time, and no schedule at all. Both timeline settings are inert there, because there is no column left for them to act on.

That threshold is a screen size, not a physical one. An 8-inch panel running 1280 × 800 is nowhere near it and draws exactly the layout a 10-inch panel draws; the devices that land on the compact layout are the small door plates and anything mounted in a frame that narrow.

So when the complaint is that the 8-inch panels are cramped, this is not the cause — solutions 1 and 2 are.