Twelve Compass improvements in one extension. Each can be turned on or off from the menu on the toolbar icon, along with its own settings. Switching something on or off takes effect straight away on any Compass tab you already have open.
Everything is on by default except Chronicle Anywhere and Hide Support Button, which start off.
Each feature has its own colour in the menu, so the rows can be told apart at a glance: the icon, the switch and a stripe down the edge all take it, and the feature's settings panel follows. Only features that are on are coloured, so the colour doubles as a sign that something is running. Turn Colour code off at the bottom of the menu and the whole thing goes back to the one accent.
Adds a Print Timetable button to the Schedule tab of a staff or student profile, and opens a clean, printable version of the week.
If the selected week is missing a day, the button says so instead, so you don't print a half-empty timetable.
- Quick print: skip the preview and open the print dialogue straight away.
The print view also has a black-and-white mode for printing without colour.
Adds a Clearance Form button to a student's profile that builds a printable clearance sheet from their timetable, with one row per subject and columns for the teacher, comments and a signature.
- Quick print: skip the preview and open the print dialogue straight away.
- Year 12 only: only show the button on Year 12 student profiles. Turn this off to use it for any year group.
The button never appears on staff profiles.
Captures a whole term from the Compass calendar and opens it as a printable page.
Open your calendar in Term view and use the Print Calendar button in the bottom-right corner of the page. It opens a small panel with Capture calendar data and Open printable calendar, shows what the last capture picked up, and says so when the calendar is on a view it can't capture from. Everything is on the page you are already looking at, so there is nothing to find in the menu first.
The same two buttons are still in the menu if you would rather work from there, and either place captures for the other.
The printable page offers a term, monthly, weekly list or daily list layout, and lets you:
- show one term or all of them
- filter by calendar layer
- hide weekends
- hide draft events, meaning anything with
(Draft)in its name. The option says how many there are, and only appears when the calendar has some. - switch between A4 and A3
- adjust the event text size to fit more on the page
Compass always opens the calendar on Week view. This switches it to the view you actually use as the page loads.
- Open the calendar on: Day, Week, Month, Term or List. Set to Term to start with.
- Start the week on Monday: lays the Month and Term views out Monday to Sunday. On by default.
- Hide weekends: leaves Saturday and Sunday out of the Month and Term views, so the five school days have the whole width. Off by default.
The calendar is held back until it has settled, so you get the finished view in one go rather than watching Compass's Week view appear and then be switched out from under you. If anything stalls it is shown regardless.
It switches once, as the page comes up. Changing view by hand afterwards sticks, and nothing pulls you back. If Compass is slow to draw its toolbar it waits for it, and if the view still won't move it leaves the page alone rather than clicking at it.
Compass already starts its Week view on Monday and leaves Month and Term starting on Sunday, which is the odd split this evens up. It is done by changing the setting the calendar itself lays out from, so the dates, events and week numbers all move together rather than the columns being shuffled around underneath them. Turning it back off takes a page reload.
Hiding weekends takes the columns out rather than painting over them, so an event running from Friday into Monday still lines up with the days it covers. Turning it back off puts the weekends straight back, with no reload.
Set this to Term and the Term Calendar Printer is always ready to capture, since that is the view it needs.
Off by default. Turn it on in the menu.
Compass only lets you create a chronicle entry from the Chronicle page. This adds a New Chronicle button to every page that opens the entry form in a pop-up over whatever you're looking at, so you never navigate away or lose your place.
The form in the pop-up is Compass's own, so entries save exactly as they would if you'd gone to the Chronicle page yourself.
- Button position: which corner the button starts from, either bottom left, bottom right or top right.
- Show just the form: hide the Chronicle page sitting behind the entry form. Turn it off if the form ever looks wrong.
- Close when finished: close the pop-up automatically once the entry is saved or cancelled.
The button slides along the edge to sit beside anything already in that corner, such as the Compass help bubble or this toolkit's own timetable buttons, and it doesn't appear when you're already on the Chronicle page. With Hide Support Button on there's no bubble to avoid, so it sits flush in the corner.
The same chronicle entries get written over and over, so this offers pre-written wording from a small Snippets button inside the entry form's own fields. Pick one and its text drops into that field. Compass saves the entry exactly as if you had typed it.
It comes with eight to start from: minor injury, head knock, sick bay, late to
class, out of uniform, mobile phone, positive recognition and contacted home.
Each uses [square brackets] to mark the bits to fill in. Edit them, delete the
ones you don't want, and add your own from the menu.
A snippet can name a chronicle field. When it does, its button only appears
in fields whose label contains that name, so an injury snippet can sit in the
injury field and nowhere else. Part of the label is enough: details finds both
"Details" and "Entry details". Leave the field blank and the snippet is offered
in every field of the entry form, which is how the built-in ones ship. The
fields on a chronicle entry are set up per school, so the extension can't guess
their names.
- Button placement: the button is put in the bottom-right of the field itself, where it stays clear of the text, and scrolls with the form the way everything else on it does. If that ever upsets a school's chronicle layout, set it to Floating and the button hovers over the field instead, touching nothing on Compass's own form.
- Insert a snippet: where the text goes when the field already has something in it, either at the cursor, at the end, or replacing what's there.
The button appears wherever the entry form opens: the Chronicle page, a student's profile, or inside the Chronicle Anywhere pop-up. Fields that aren't free text, such as the type dropdown and date pickers, are left alone, and a field no snippet matches doesn't get a button at all. Nor does anything outside the entry form: the comment box against each student while marking the roll is Compass's own, not part of a chronicle entry, so it is left as it is.
Snippets are synced with your Chrome profile, so they follow you between machines. Chrome caps how much can be synced; if you ever hit it, the menu says so rather than losing the snippet.
Hides system and support accounts from the staff directory so you only see real people.
- Hide names containing: an editable list of phrases. Any staff card whose
name contains one of them is hidden. Comes with
(DOE Integration),(Program Kaartdijin),Kaartdijinand(STIMS); add or remove as you like. - Show everyone on one page: reads through the directory's pages and puts them all in one list. On by default.
Compass pages the directory before any of this hides anything, so a page arrives with the system accounts still counted in it and comes out short, with real staff pushed onto a second page. Turning Compass's own page size up cannot fix that: the largest it offers is a hundred, and a school with more real staff than that is still split.
With Show everyone on one page on, the page size goes to its largest, each page is read in turn, and the results are put back together under their own Active and Inactive headings.
The list is covered from the moment Compass draws its first card until it is finished, so you never see the unfiltered version appear and then have thirty accounts taken out of it, and you never watch it jump between pages on the way. While the pages are being read it says Loading the full staff list. If anything stalls, the list is shown regardless.
Searching, sorting and the status filter all behave normally. Each of them gives a different set of people, so the assembled list is dropped the moment one changes and Compass's own results are shown instead. If those results still run to more than one page they are read into one list the same way. The pager disappears and the count is replaced with one that describes what you can actually see, so Showing 1-100 of 134 becomes Showing all 100 (34 hidden). Searching or sorting still works; the list is rebuilt behind you when it does.
Compass's own Download PDF on the staff directory gives you a list of names and details. This prints the cards themselves, photo and all, which is what is actually wanted for a staffroom wall or a relief folder.
Use Print Staff Cards, which sits next to Compass's own Download PDF on the directory toolbar and is a copy of that button, so it looks like it belongs there. If the toolbar can't be found it falls back to a button in the bottom-right corner rather than not appearing. The printable page lets you choose:
- A4 or A3, portrait or landscape
- how many cards across, from two to six
- the photo above the details for a wall display, or beside them for a compact list that fits far more to a page
- photos or no photos
- colour or black and white
Whatever the directory is showing is what prints, so with Clean Staff Directory on you get the real staff and none of the system accounts, and with Show everyone on one page you get all of them in one go rather than a page at a time.
Every sheet is laid out to be exactly one page and every card on it is the same fixed size, so nothing is ever split across a page break. Cards are then stretched to fill the sheet, so the leftover paper at the foot of a page goes into the photos instead of going to waste, and the photo frame is portrait to match the head shots Compass stores. The text is measured after it is drawn and the cards grown if anything came up short, so a long name or a long email address pushes nothing off the bottom.
Photos are copied while the page still has your Compass session and shrunk to printing size on the way, since the printable page has no session of its own and would otherwise show empty frames.
Stops Compass opening a new tab every time you click something.
- Keep School Favourites in new tabs: links under the School Favourites menu, and the Outlook link, still open in a new tab.
- Open links inside posts in a new tab: links in news feed posts and rich text open in a new tab so you don't lose your place in the feed.
Turn the whole feature off and every link goes back to behaving the way Compass intended.
Compass advertises modules your school has not bought inside its own navigation
menus. This takes them out. They are tagged in the markup, either with a
feature-demo class or by pointing at FeatureDemonstration.aspx, so they can
be picked out exactly and nothing you actually have access to is touched.
It also hides any subheading left with nothing under it, such as Activity Management or School Administration, and any whole menu whose dropdown was adverts and nothing else.
- Show module adverts: off, which is what hides them. Turn it on to have Compass's advertising back.
- Show empty headings: off, so a subheading or a whole menu with nothing left under it goes as well.
Beyond the adverts, the menu can be trimmed to taste. Open the menu on the toolbar icon with a Compass page open and the panel reads that page's menus and lists them: every entry with a switch, grouped under the menu it belongs to. Switch one off and it goes. Each menu's own name has a switch too, for dropping a whole menu at once.
Every switch in the panel means the same thing: on is on the menu. That is why the two above are worded as showing rather than hiding, even though both start off.
Because the list comes off the page rather than being typed in, it only ever offers what that person actually has, and there is nothing to spell correctly. The placeholder Compass shows while a menu fills in, such as Loading Class Items..., is never offered, since it disappears on its own. In the rare case where a menu holds nothing else yet, the list waits a moment for the real entries rather than showing that menu short. Open the menu somewhere other than Compass and it says so rather than showing an empty list.
The hiding is done with a stylesheet rather than by walking the page, so the adverts never appear and then vanish. Turning the feature off puts everything straight back, with no reload.
Entries are remembered by their link, so a choice survives Compass rewording a menu. One that no longer exists is simply never matched.
If Compass renames the feature-demo class in a future release the adverts will
come back; the fix is the selectors at the top of
src/content/feature-menu-declutter.js.
Off by default. Turn it on in the menu.
Hides the Compass help and support bubble that sits in the bottom-left corner of every page.
Turning it off brings the bubble straight back, with no reload needed.
Clicking the Attendance Notes require review alert on the home page normally drops you on the Attendance page's default tab. With this on, it opens the Notes tab directly.
Navigating to the Attendance page any other way is left alone. Only the alert triggers the jump.