Browse mode

Isolating one teacher has always been easy: filter to them. What was awkward was saying now the next one.

Browse is that. It turns the grid into a single teacher's, room's or class's week and puts arrows on it, so checking every member of staff is one keystroke each rather than a filter, a read, and a filter again.

Start it from Task ▸ Browse, or from the command palette.

A big timetable starts here on its own

Past roughly a hundred placed lessons, opening the timetable puts you straight into Browse rather than showing the whole week. A five-day, eight-period week is forty cells, and a hundred lessons is two and a half to every one of them — at that density the grid stops being something you read and becomes something you decode. So the app opens on one teacher instead.

It is an ordinary task, not a mode you are stuck in. The Task button names it, and Exit — or Esc — gives you the whole week back for the rest of your visit.

Nothing is remembered, on purpose. Leaving is not a preference you have set: the next visit looks at the timetable again and decides afresh. A timetable that grows past the threshold starts opening this way, and one that shrinks below it stops.

Only placed lessons count — the ones with both a day and a time. Anything still in the unassigned drawer is not on the grid, so it cannot make the grid harder to read. The threshold is a site-wide setting; a hundred is the default.

This applies to you, signed in. Somebody opening a share link always gets the view you published for them, however big the timetable is.

Stepping through

The arrows — or the left and right arrow keys — walk the list in the timetable's own order, the same order you arranged in the data screen. The name box jumps straight to anyone, so you can start in the middle.

If you work from the keyboard, the two combine: type part of a name, press Enter, and you land on that person with the arrows already live, so you can carry straight on stepping from wherever you jumped to.

Switch between browsing teachers, rooms and student sets from the bar itself.

For student sets there is one more choice: whether the arrows step through years, groups or subgroups. A year and a subgroup are very different review tasks — one is a cohort overview, the other is a specific set of children — and browsing a year gathers everything beneath it, all the way down.

Leave with Exit, with Esc, or by starting any other task.

It works with your filters, not against them

Browse and Filter compose. Filter to maths, then browse teachers, and you step through each teacher's maths lessons. Neither control undoes the other.

Just as importantly, Browse does not touch your saved filters. It is a transient view by design: whatever it changes it puts back when you leave, so you can dip into it in the middle of a piece of work and return to exactly the setup you had.

That is why browsing a teacher does not fill your filter chips with their name. The chips still describe your filters, which is what makes them trustworthy.

What it is good for

The review pass at the end. Once a timetable is built, somebody has to look at every teacher's week and ask whether it is humane — no five-lesson days without a break, no single lesson stranded on a Friday afternoon, no room in a different building three minutes after a lesson ends.

That question has to be asked one person at a time, and browse is the shape of that task.