Data collection
Importing data into your timetable
You already hold most of this information somewhere — in a student information system, an HR database, or a spreadsheet someone maintains by hand. Wise Timetable reads it rather than making you retype it.
- Excel, CSV, XML, REST API
- Ready-made templates
- Custom mapping available
- 112-page import reference, published free
Every route in, and you can mix them
There is no single blessed import path that everything must go through.
Excel and CSV import covers the majority of institutions, because almost every source system can produce one. XML is supported where your systems speak it natively. And a documented REST API allows direct, scheduled synchronisation from your student information system so the timetable stays current without anyone running an export.
Crucially, these are not exclusive choices. Import your programme structure from the SIS, your room inventory from a spreadsheet the estates office keeps, and enter the three new seminar rooms by hand — all into the same dataset. Automated import and manual adjustment can be combined at any point.
- Excel and CSV files, the most common route
- XML for systems that produce it natively
- REST API libraries for direct integration and scheduled synchronisation
- Manual entry for anything not held anywhere else
- Any combination of the above, into one dataset
Templates for the common cases, mapping for yours
Many ready-made templates exist, so most institutions get started quickly with a file layout we already understand. Where your setup requires something unique — and in higher education it frequently does — imports can be tailored precisely to your specifications rather than forcing you to reshape your data to suit our software.
Send us a sample export before you commit to anything. We will tell you honestly what maps cleanly, what needs work, and what will have to be entered by hand.
What you will typically import
- Programmes, years, study areas and modules, with their hierarchy
- Courses and sessions, with contact hours and session types
- Student groups and cohort sizes, including combined groups
- Lecturers, with their teaching loads and department affiliation
- Rooms and facilities, with capacity, equipment and building
- Existing constraints and fixed commitments carried over from last year
Every import, documented in full
The complete import reference is published, free, and readable before you are a customer.
The Importing Companion is a catalogue of every import and data operation in the desktop application. It covers the standard CSV imports on the Data menu — rooms, lecturers, programmes, courses, reservations, students, exams — then 67 custom import codes written for particular institutional file layouts, and the custom operations that convert or export what is already in the schedule. For each one: how it is started, the exact columns it expects, a short sample file, and the traps.
It is written from the source code rather than from memory, and where the code does something surprising that is written down plainly instead of being smoothed over. An import that silently skips a malformed line is more dangerous than one that refuses it, and knowing which is which is most of the value of a document like this. One appendix lists the imports that can destroy data; another gives the order in which the chained families have to be run.
We publish it before the sale rather than after, because the honest way to answer “can it read our data?” is to let the person who maintains that data read the specification and decide.
Download the import reference
- Wise Timetable — Importing Companion (PDF, 112 pages)Every standard CSV import, all 67 custom import codes and every custom operation, each with its columns, a sample file and its known traps. Includes the appendix of imports that can destroy data.
- Wise Timetable REST API — Integration Manual (PDF)Where scheduled synchronisation replaces file import entirely: every endpoint, authentication, caching and worked examples in four languages.
Related capabilities
- The REST APIWhen the data should arrive by itself rather than as a file.
- Manual inputFor everything that does not exist in a file anywhere.
- SIS integration and APIScheduled synchronisation rather than one-off imports.
- Lecturer availabilityThe data your lecturers supply themselves.
- Moving from Excel to automated timetablingWhat actually changes when you stop scheduling in spreadsheets.
- DocumentationEvery manual we publish, including the two referenced above.
See Wise Timetable on your own data
Book a 45-minute online presentation. We will walk through your institution's scheduling problem, show how Wise Timetable handles it, and answer anything your team wants to test.