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Schedule Formatter

Purpose

The schedules displayed by PeopleSoft are in a terrible format. A new feature, View My Weekly Schedule, is a bit of an improvement. This schedule formatter makes them look even better. See the example formatted schedule for an idea of what the output looks like.

Instructions

Here's how to view your schedule online and run it through the formatter:

  1. Log in to Pitt's PeopleSoft server.
  2. Follow the menus:
    1. SA Self Service
    2. Learner Services
    3. Academics
    4. View My Class Schedule
    5. Select the term you want.
  3. Click somewhere in the schedule to make sure the computer's focus is there.
  4. Use your browser's "Select All" feature. Most people can do this by pressing CTRL+A. (You might try Edit | Select All in your menus if that doesn't work.)
  5. Copy the text. CTRL+C, Edit | Copy, or however else you might do it.
  6. Paste the text in the text area at the bottom of this page. Try CTRL+V or Edit | Paste.
  7. Press "Format."

Compatibility

At the moment, this works in Firefox. It will probably work in Opera soon. Don't hold your breath for Internet Explorer support, but we'll see.

Problems

If it doesn't work, please let me know. My e‐mail address can be found at the bottom of the sidebar on the right side of the screen. Send me a message, and include your unformatted schedule (the text you copied from PeopleSoft), and I can probably get it fixed. This works with all five of my schedules and with at least one other, but there are a lot of little things that can go wrong with different schedules. Fortunately, most are easy to fix, so please do contact me if you have problems.

Unfortunately, you cannot bookmark the generated schedule, nor can you save it to disk. Well, you can, but there won't be anything there when you return. If you really really want to save your formatted schedule, I have instructions for you for Firefox:

  1. Open the window with your formatted schedule.
  2. Choose Tools | DOM Inspector from the menu.
  3. There should be some text about #document html HTML in the left pane of the window that appears.
  4. Right‐click on HTML (the one with a plus sign to its left), and select "Copy XML."
  5. Open Notepad or some similar plain‐text editor. Not MS Word or Wordpad, unless you know how to save as text from them.
  6. Paste.
  7. Save the file, giving it an extension of html or htm. (An extension of xml will not work right because Firefox will save the page in HTML format.) For example, you might just call it schedule.html.

Privacy / Security

None of the information you enter here leaves your computer; all of the formatting is done by code executed in your browser. The code is basic JavaScript and should not harm your computer in any way (though, for legal reasons, I make no guarantee). If you have problems with the schedule formatter and e‐mail me your schedule, I will not use it except to fix the program.

Format Your Schedule