A slot is a narrow opening, often a hole or groove. It may be used to receive something, such as a coin or letter. A slot may also be a position or assignment, such as a job or a place to stay. Alternatively, it can refer to an area of a field or track in sports, such as the open space between the face-off circles on an ice hockey rink.

The term slot is also commonly used to describe the position of a player in a football team, such as the wide receiver. A good slot WR is known for their speed and ability to run a variety of routes, such as slants, switch routes, and cross routes. This position requires a high level of twitchiness, as the receiver is often in the middle of the field and needs to be quick to beat linebackers.

There are several types of slots, and each type has a different configuration. Periodic slots, for example, are designed to represent data that repeats at a regular time interval (for example, the rate of evaporation of a reservoir). These types of data are best represented in periodic slot tables rather than in series slots, since they can be solved and displayed without losing their time element.

A single slot can contain multiple timesteps, but all of the timesteps in a single slot must have the same length. If a single timestep has the wrong length, the slot will be truncated, and the values within it are interpolated or looked up depending on the slot’s configuration. A slot’s configuration can be modified from the View, Configure Period menu.

In general, a time series slot can be configured as either an ordinary time-series slot or an integer indexed time-series slot. In an ordinary time-series mode, the individual values are directly editable in the slot dialog. In an integer indexed mode, the individual values are stored in an SCT, and they can only be accessed by using a standard time-series command (for example, SCT: Slot[number>]).

The configuration of a slot also impacts the way it is referenced from RPL. In RPL, the slot is accessed by DateTime: Slot[number>], with the configuration set from the View, Configure Period menu. This configuration is also applied when accessing a value between rows; for example, when a periodic slot contains a value at a timestep outside of the range of its periodicity, this value will be interpolated or looked up. In addition, the configuration of a time-series slot can be used to define warning messages for values that are set during Simulation, and these can be shown in the diagnostics window. These warnings can be disabled by setting the Warnings option in the Options window. The settings are shown in the dialog pictured below.