Ha! Banner was designed in the dark ages of 640x480 monitors and has remained locked in its UI approach since then. It is written to establish a fantasy-land, multi-screen flowchart with only ascii text input for the process that faculty and staff should use to manage student and finance records in academic institutions. I have heard that the same group of computer engineers wrote similar-looking software for nurses to monitor patients in triage and hospital situations.

But I digress. :-/

What is hear is that you want to develop a training plan for folks who have not been initiated to the system. You want it to be visual.

For this goal, I would suggest using Curio. It will allow you to capture screen shots of the Web browser input, paste them on a whiteboard, lay them out in a workflow, annotate and describe them, and hyperlink them to each other and/or to external resources.

Jeffery Smith wrote:

I realize that my challenge is sort of an odd one.

What I need to learn (and then teach others) is part of a much larger
Human Resource system (named Banner) that is essentially a huge
relational database with modules for Human Resources, Student Records,
and Class Offerings, It is like PeopleSoft, but better implemented for
higher education.

What I have are dozens of screens, some of which are HR screens, some of
which are Student Record (enrollment) screens, and some of which are
rules for how faculty will be paid based on which classes are linked to
each instructor. So, I'm working within a pre-defined database to which
I have to link records using multiple tables. What I need is some sort
of visual system (or WikiLink system) until I get straight in my head
which tables link to which tables, and which fields are absolutely
essential. So, I'm teaching myself because the vendor of the software
would prefer that I spend a week in another state learning en masse with
others. That's not an option because I'm serving as a consultant on this
for the next 6 months. I actually had the system prepared and ready to
implement when someone at the college pulled the plug on it at the last
minute. That was in 2016, so I'm re-acquainting myself with the very
complicated system 3 years later.

It is a difficult system to get set up and implemented because it
doesn't necessarily match up with the way things have been done in the
past.

J J Weimer wrote:
I am a bit confused about which parts YOU do versus which parts the
>software app is to do.
>
>* Do YOU manually assign the faculty to the classes, or should the
>software do this (through some optimization routines)?
>
>* Do YOU manually set up the payment rules for the classes in advance,
>or is the software supposed to do this somehow?
>
>* What is meant by "runs a routine merging faculty with classes" ...?
>
>I have to think that what you want is this ...
>
>(Database of Faculty)
>(Database of Classes)
>(Database of Payment Rules for Classes)
>(Database of Faculty Assignments for Semester)
>--> payments required per faculty
>
>I have to imagine that a spreadsheet app could do the job using
internal
>cell functions and reference calls.
>
>Alternatively, I have to think that the datatool package in LaTeX might
>do what you need (and give you a nicely-formatted PDF report to submit
>with no greater effort).
>
>The FileMaker Pro app should be able to tear this up with no problem.
>
>Little that I know about it, someone is bound to say that you should
use
>an SQL variant database tool.
>
>Is this where you are going with what you need?