Reference

Driving Wise Timetable from the keyboard

A timetabling office repeats the same half-dozen actions several hundred times a week. These are the keys that turn three interactions into one.

Why this is worth ten minutes

Course scheduling is not one long task. It is a few thousand short ones: look at who is free, open the subject, change a turn, look again. The interactions that cost the most are not the difficult decisions — they are the ones repeated between the decisions.

Wise Timetable is a desktop application, and that is worth something specific here rather than in the abstract: a key goes to the screen in front of you without a round trip, so a shortcut can move the whole view rather than focus a field. Everything below is in the product today. Nothing has to be enabled and nothing has to be configured.

Function keys change what the main screen is showing, in context, without losing your place.
Alt plus a letter opens another screen directly — programmes, branches, lecturers, locations.
Typing in any list searches it, and it matches anywhere in the name rather than only at the start.
F12 edits whatever is selected, whichever view you are in.

Changing what the main screen shows

The four views are the same timetable read four ways, and these swap between them for whatever is currently selected.

Key	What it does
F5	Room view — the timetable of the selected room.
F6	Lecturer view.
F7	Group view.
F8	Course view.
F12	Edit whatever is selected in the current view: the lecturer, the subject, the room or the group. One key, four screens, decided by where you are.
Left / right arrow	Move the week slider a week at a time.
Esc	Cancel a swap that is half-made, and put the cursor back.

Hold Alt. These are the screens a planner opens most often while building, and each of them is otherwise two or three menu steps away.

Key	Opens
Alt + C	Programmes.
Alt + T	Branches.
Alt + I	Lecturers.
Alt + L	Locations.
Alt + Y	Academic year details — semester dates and holidays. The same screen the year transition sends you to, because the first day of the winter semester is what defines week 1.
Alt + U	The combined schedule across member databases, for a university whose faculties keep their own timetables.
Ctrl + W	Change how many rows the workspace shows at once.
D	Show or hide what has been disabled. No modifier — it is a single keystroke on purpose, because it is used as a glance rather than as a setting.

Typing is searching, in every list in the product

Start typing while a list has the focus and the selection jumps to the first item that contains what you typed — not the first that begins with it. That distinction is the whole point in a list of Surname Firstname, where the surname is usually what you have.

The typed text clears itself after a short pause, on Escape, and on the first character that cannot be part of a name; Backspace takes one character off it. It is installed on every list in the product from one place, so it behaves identically wherever you meet it.

One deliberate limit worth knowing: only unaccented letters go into the search buffer. Typing antoli finds Antolič Ana and Antolis Krunoslav alike — which is the behaviour a planner wants anyway, because the diacritic is the part nobody is certain of.

On the subject screen

The list of subjects is the screen a planner spends the most time in after the workspace itself.

Key	What it does
Type anything	The first character goes into the search box and takes the focus with it, so the rest of what you type follows it. The list keeps its selection and its blue current row until then.
F3	Jump to the next subject matching what is in the search box, wrapping round at the end of the list. Pressed while the list has the focus, it puts the cursor in the search box first.
Enter	Open the selected subject for editing.
Esc	Close the screen.

The maintenance keys

These change data rather than the view, so they are worth reading before pressing. None of them can be undone by pressing the same key again.

Key	What it does
Shift + F12	Generate web passwords for every lecturer who has none. Existing passwords are left alone. The result is written to `TutorPasswords.csv` in the program data folder, semicolon separated, so it opens in Excel and can be mail-merged.
Ctrl + F12	The same for groups, into `GroupPasswords.csv`.
Shift + Insert, Ctrl + Insert	The same two, but overwriting passwords that already exist. This is the one to be careful with: everybody's password changes, including the ones people have already been given.
Ctrl + F10	Ask the database now whether anything has changed — new web reservations, another planner's work — and show the history log.
Shift + F10	Mark every reservation made on the web as new again, so a different timetable can import them as new.
Shift + F11	Reload the language files, the colour scheme and the templates without restarting. This is the key to know if you edit a configuration file while the program is running.
Ctrl + Shift + A	Open the activation dialog straight from the main window — the screen that decides which database this installation uses. It asks before it does anything, because a successful activation restarts the program.
Ctrl + F1	Start a remote support session.

Take it with you

Where the rest of it is written down

The 278-page user manual carries the full list, including the keys that belong to individual screens. It is published free and ungated, like everything else on the documentation page.

And if only one thing here is worth taking away, take the four view keys: F5, F6, F7, F8. Checking who is free before making a change is the most repeated action in a timetabling office, and those four turn it into one keystroke. More on why that matters.

Want to see this working?

Book a 45-minute online presentation and we will walk through it against your institution's own scheduling problem.

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