Tabler - A time table to visualize course time conflicts

Tabler’s Smart Algorithm to Fight Workday Scheduling

Built for anyone involved with course planning, taking, or creating.

July 7th, 2025

“That’s all I do?” says Sarah as she fills in the last filter with her mouse. “Seven filters and I can see all the courses I need, and the conflicts they have with each other? This is so much faster than using the old Excel sheet we used for five years. I don’t know how we used that for so long when we could’ve created something like this.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know why we never did this before, but I’m never going back.” Sarah is the first course coordinator to use Tabler, a year-old internal tool that uses an intuitive UI and scheduling algorithm to make course planning as easy as seven buttons.

Tabler is an essential internal tool for universities to ease the pain of course planning across several different faculties. Imagine you have a student who must take courses that span across three majors. It is extremely painful to have to go through several documents and find each course, grab the times they occur during the day, compare them into a schedule, find which sections do not conflict with each other, and so on. With Tabler, you skip all of those steps with one central scheduling tool where you filter the exact courses you need to see in seconds. On top of intuitive functionality, Tabler introduces a beautiful UI inspired by Google Calendar for the most modern look to scheduling to date. No more sifting through hundreds of Excel spreadsheet files and keeping several times in your head at once with Tabler. “I used to have to compare eight different Excel sheets at once, clicking back and forth for hours. Tabler took me 10 seconds to figure out which filters I needed and another 15 seconds to find the course times which conflicted.”

Tabler is accessible to internal faculty for course planning and coordinating with separate faculties. Given that the average course coordinator spends 2.5 weeks just planning course times, Tabler cuts that down to less than one week. Engineers mentioned they “created Tabler to increase efficiency with course coordinators and have the intention to release it to students for course planning as well.” “The seven-filter design is an amazing feature for course planning and creating a schedule for future terms and degree planning,” a junior at The University of British Columbia commented on a feedback forum.

Users can easily get started by filtering down the course name, code, time frame, and days to instantly display specific courses from a database of 10k lines of course data. The user can hover over each course to display it in the timetable to learn specific details about the course to double-check they have the right course. If they are a course coordinator that needs to add a new course or edit an existing course, Tabler does this with ease as well. With a searchable in-house database, course coordinators can find a course, edit it, and save it in seconds. “I can finally control and update courses on a whim if I need to! I truly feel that I own the course now,” Leo, a course coordinator and professor of 10 years, expresses when using Tabler.

James, eating a sandwich from a local cafe, closes Excel for the last time. “Y’know, I’m glad I never have to touch Excel again for course planning. Spreadsheets always felt like a waste of time; best part is, I don’t even need to think anymore, I just click seven buttons and a day’s work is done!”

Visit this website and start planning: [ LINK TBA ]

Frequently Asked Questions Customer FAQs

FAQ 1: Is the database of Tabler completely new or does it import old database info? Will we need to input all the data ourselves (course coordinators)?

The old database used for course planning in the past will be migrated and conformed to fit the needs of the Tabler app. Don’t worry, we thought about this—you will not need to input all of your courses manually if you are a new course coordinator.

FAQ 2: Are there plans to incorporate major requirements for each major?

Yes, currently in the latest version we assume users will know their course requirements and sort the schedule based off their needs. However, in the near future, the team plans to implement major requirement filters to make course planning even more efficient.

Internal FAQs

FAQ 1: How can we trust just any course coordinator to edit and update courses?

We will use secure authentication and authorization to identify the user and give them corresponding permissions. This way, not just “any” user can edit and update courses. To ensure we can receive proper feedback to update courses from non-authorized users, we are going to have a ticketing system as well.

FAQ 2: Have you considered creating this application for different universities?

Currently, we are only building this application for UBC because the familiar course structure allows for more secure and robust data modeling. However, if there is large interest from other universities, we are not against partnering with separate universities.

FAQ 3: Why not prepare it for students out of the box?

Students are not at the forefront of the customer persona because Tabler is for course planning and identifying conflicts. So if a student plans their schedule around the times on Tabler, the course coordinators may change the times before the student can register. This can cause confusion and frustration for students who relied on their Tabler schedule.