You should look at the people tab once you have finished previous steps, especially Step 2: Importing User Data. You need to bring the guest and host data into the spreadsheet view and then use it to update the list of hosts and guests.
Clicking on the people tab brings up this view:
A list of people loaded into Visigoth are on the left, waiting for you to select one. You can use the tab above to look at guests, hosts, or to search for individuals by name.
Click on any person to see their schedule:
Each day is shown in sequence, and you can show or hide the day by clicking the eye icon. All the events are shown on the left side of the schedule, and you can click on them to jump to the event editor page.
The main part of the schedule view shows the meetings. We’ll first show you how to interpret these, and then how to make changes to the schedule.
Visual Cues
Each meeting has some visual cues to help convey details about it.
Meeting Requests
In order to see the requests between two people, you can look at the little corner flags attached to each person’s name. The color of the flag, gold or silver, implies high- and low-priority respectively. The upper flag shows the faculty’s request, and the lower flag shows the student’s request.
For example, here are excerpts from faculty member Conrad Schmitt’s schedule:
Conrad Schmitt does not request Joan Jenkins, but she requests him with low priority.
Conrad Schmitt requests Craig Lee with low priority and Craig requests him with high priority.
Conrad Schmitt requests Janet Peterson with high priority but she does not request him.
You can hover over these flags to see an explanation.
Person Tag / Lozenge
In the scheduler, each person includes a color-coded tag for easy grouping. By default, this will display as “VIS” for visitor, and “FAC” for faculty, but you can change this to anything (including form responses, such as their area of interest or if they are already a member of CMU.)
Regular / Irregular Slots and Locked Meetings
The autoscheduler will only schedule meetings in the regular timeslots, but you may manually schedule a meeting at any time. At the top-right corner of each meeting, a lock icon means that the autoscheduler will not change the meeting if re-run. At the bottom-right corner, the information icon tells you if the meeting was manually scheduled outside regular times. You may hover over the icon to see an explanation of what it means.
Scheduled during a regular slot, typically by the autoscheduler.
Scheduled during a regular slot. Locked, so it will not be overridden by the autoscheduler. (Manually scheduled meetings are locked by default.)
Manually scheduled outside regular slots. Hover over the icon at the bottom-right for details.
Manually scheduled, but blocks regular slots. Blocked slots are hatched out. Hover over the icon at the bottom-right for details.
Editing the Schedule
This interface is where you can make manual changes to schedules by dragging and dropping people onto (or off) the schedule. Here we’ll show you how to do that:
Requested People
If you have a guest’s schedule open, you can see their requests by switching to the list of hosts, and vice-versa.
Janet Peterson’s schedule is open (above, right side), and the list of hosts is open (above, left side). The list of hosts shows all hosts with requests at the top. You can create meetings by dragging any host into a guests schedule and vice-versa.
Note that meetings must have exactly one host and at least one guest. It is not possible to have a meeting with multiple hosts. Meetings may not overlap. Trying to create an invalid meeting will fail with an error message.
Meetings and availability
When dragging a person onto a schedule, the availability of the person being dragged is shown in the override bar. Red indicates meetings, and orange indicates events. You can never override meetings, but you can always override conflicting events.
You can drop the dragged person:
- On an empty meeting cell, to create a meeting in that time slot.
- On the shaded bar, to create a meeting at any time. Your created meeting cannot overlap an existing meeting (red) but can override any event (orange).
- On the little trash can icon at the bottom-right to remove it.
- If you are dragging a visitor, you can drop them onto an existing meeting to add them to that meeting.
If you’d like the autoscheduler to provide you with an initial schedule for tweaking, continue on to Step 5: Autoscheduler to see how to use it.