The CatSched Viewer is a Power BI report that gathers data from the CatSched app (used for scheduling courses for future semesters) and displays the data in an aggregated format so faculty and staff can easily understand how many courses are potentially scheduled for a given block of time.
The CatSched Viewer can be accessed via this link OR by opening data.davidson.edu in your web browser and navigating to the "Class Schedules" folder.
Refresh Schedule
The report data refreshes from the CatSched app every 30 minutes, at the 3rd and 33rd minute of every hour. Keep that in mind if you just entered data in CatSched, then immediately went to the CatSched viewer and you don't see your data yet.
Layout
The report is broken down into three main parts: the report header, the calendar matrix, and the courses table.
The report header runs horizontally along the top quarter of the report, and contains a brief description of the report, the date and time when the data was last refreshed, and two sets of slicers that allow you to interactively filter the data in the report:
- Academic Term (fall vs. spring)
- Department (e.g., BIO, ECO, POL, etc.)
To use the slicers, just click the items you want to see, and unclick the items you don't want to see. The screenshot above shows what options you would click if you want to see all Fall 2020 courses for Classics and Latin.
The calendar matrix is a visual showing the number of courses currently allocated to a given time slot. The row headers along the left axis of the matrix provide the start times for the courses, while the column headers along the top axis provide the day of the week in which the courses are scheduled. Where the two axes intersect, you'll find a number which tells you how many courses are currently scheduled to BEGIN in that time slot.For example, in the screenshot below you can see that 5 courses are currently scheduled to take place each Wednesday at 9:30 AM.
Also note the red shading of the cells in the calendar matrix. This shading corresponds to the relative number of courses that are scheduled in each time slot. If a cell is shaded darker, it has more courses scheduled relative to the other time slots. If a cell is blank, there are no courses currently scheduled for that time slot.
Finally, the courses table provides a simple list view of the course schedule data coming from the CatSched app. A scrollbar along the right side of the table allows you to scroll through the list when needed. Each of the columns in this table is able to be sorted interactively by clicking on the column name. By default, the table is sorted in order of department (ascending), course number (ascending), and section (ascending), but you can sort by the section title by simply clicking the "sectionTitle" column header.
Interactivity
The checkboxes, the calendar matrix, and the courses table are all interactive by default. Here we'll describe some examples of how you can use these features to explore the CatSched data.
"Tuesday/Thursday classes starting at 9:40 AM seem to be our busiest time slot. What courses are currently scheduled for these times?"
To answer this question, all you need to do is make a single click on the calendar matrix. Move your mouse to where the Tuesday column intersects with the 9:40 AM row, and click on the shaded cell. When you do this, the courses table will automatically filter to show just the 9 courses in that time slot, and the calendar matrix will highlight the cell you selected. To clear this filter, just click the cell a second time, and the report will go back to the way it was originally filtered.
"How do I see all courses scheduled to happen on Wednesdays?"
In the calendar matrix, just click the column header labeled "Wed."
"How do I see all courses scheduled for 12:30 PM every day of the week?"
In the calendar matrix, just click the row header labeled "12:30 PM."
"How can I select multiple time slots from the calendar matrix; for example, how do I see all courses scheduled for both 9:40 AM and 12:15 PM?"
This requires you to Ctrl+Click with your mouse. First click the row header labeled "9:40 AM," then move your mouse to the "12:15 PM" row header, hold down your keyboard's Ctrl key, and right-click your mouse pointer. Only these two rows in the calendar matrix will be highlighted, and the courses table will filter as it did in the previous examples.
"I clicked my department, but I don't see any results in either the calendar matrix or the courses table."
At this point, make sure you have selected the correct term from the controls at the top of the page. If you're in the correct term, but still no data is visible in either the calendar matrix or the courses table, then it's possible that the data entered in the CatSched app has not yet been added to this report.
Still Having Issues?
Email ti@davidson.edu to open a ticket with the Technology & Innovation team, and tell them that you're having difficulty with the CatSched Viewer report. Please provide a link to the report and give a detailed description of what steps you took when using the report, what the expected outcome of those steps was, and what the actual/unexpected outcome was. For example, "I clicked on the 'REL' checkbox so I would see all Religion courses, but I received this long error message. [paste error message here]."
This kind of detailed info will greatly help us in diagnosing the problem a lot faster for you.