If you are active in the education sector, you most likely are no stranger to regularly absent students. Back in the day, attendance was often tracked by checking printed lists of students’ names that had to be painstakingly reviewed on a weekly or monthly basis. Even though schools still use this system, many already embraced new technologies to automate student attendance tracking.
Adopting automation and using new technologies has saved teachers a lot of precious time. In the meantime, efficiency in the administration area increased as well. However, there are many different software tools available and it’s difficult to find the right one for your needs.
Maybe you do not want to invest heavily in complex software with a steep learning curve. If you prefer a more reliable and affordable option, use spreadsheets to build an automated attendance template in Excel.
Why use Excel to create a student attendance tracker?
- Flexible: You can create your own attendance system to suit your school. When things change in the future you can simply adapt your spreadsheets, without the need for new software or IT support.
- Accessible: You can access data for all your classes from anywhere in the world on your laptop or smartphone.
- Compatible with everything: Every other piece of software in the world integrates with Excel. If you have data stored in other programs, you can easily download or directly import that data and centralize everything in Excel.
- Easy to use: Almost every professional works with spreadsheets at some point during their life. Excel is a very intuitive and user-friendly system, even for spreadsheet novices. This makes maintenance and training easier, and you can be sure that your system is future-proof.
How to get started
Sheetgo’s student attendance template in Excel is a pre-built system for automated attendance management.
It provides schools, colleges, training centers and any other organization that require tracking attendance a simple and reliable way to take roll.
What is a spreadsheet-based workflow template?
The workflow in Excel provides you with more than just some pre-built tables, charts and formulas. It is a complete system consisting of several interconnected Excel sheets that exchange data between them. First, it gives you the ability to work in your own individual file. This keeps your data secure and separated. Additionally, the template gives you the option to combine data from different files into a centralized and automated dashboard.
Moreover, when you have a lot of teachers taking attendance in the same spreadsheet, it becomes overloaded. Consequently, the whole progress is slowed down. Separate spreadsheets ensure that your workflow operates smoothly.
A spreadsheet-based template gives you:
- Organization and data privacy: Each file is dedicated to one specific task, keeping data flows secure and separated. Teachers have their own personal spreadsheets for tracking student attendance. At the same time, the manager can combine confidential data from all professors and classes into one central spreadsheet and dashboard.
- Scalability: Excel has a powerful sharing function but when you have too many people working in the same file it can become overloaded with data and slow to process. Dividing data between separate, specialized spreadsheets keeps the system operating smoothly. When you need to add a new class or teacher, simply duplicate one of the spreadsheets and share it with the team member responsible.
- Integration: As well as enabling you to easily import and incorporate data from other software, a spreadsheet-based workflow allows managers to merge data from across the entire company. In a matter of clicks, you can connect your attendance management workflow with your finance workflow (or those from other departments) to generate a top-level report for directors.
What you get with this template
The Sheetgo student attendance template contains of 4 Microsoft Excel files with pre-built Sheetgo connections inside:
- Three Class spreadsheets. Share these with your team of teachers, and make as many copies as you need for additional classes. Each teacher tracks their students’ attendance in their separate Class file. The spreadsheet automatically provides the teacher with averages and totals, so they can keep track of each student.
- One Attendance Management master sheet, for the school administrator or head of department. Sheetgo connections pull data from the teachers’ Class spreadsheets directly into this file. A dashboard displays key information such as attendance rates per class and the top 10 students who are repeatedly absent. An attendance tracker tab allows you to check if roll was taken for every class, each day. It even flags up any teachers who have forgotten to take attendance. You also get an automated overview per student and an overview per month.
How to install the Sheetgo attendance template in Excel
- Click the blue button below to get started. Sign up for Sheetgo with your Google, Microsoft, or Dropbox account.
- Click Install template and choose your preferred platform to store your copy of the template.
- Please allow a few moments as Sheetgo creates the connections and saves a copy of the template files to your chosen storage.
Attendance template
Spreadsheets based workflow template to record and analyze student attendance.
How to use the Attendance template
Step 1: Share the Class spreadsheets with teachers
Share each Class spreadsheet with the teacher responsible for filling them out. To do this, open one of the files by double-clicking it in the Attendance management workflow.
The Class spreadsheet now opens in a new tab. Choose to use the template online or in the Excel Desktop App.
Simply click Share in the Excel file and share the file with the right teacher.
Step 2: Enter student data
Once you have shared each Class spreadsheet with the teacher(s), they can overwrite the sample data in the file and enter the relevant list of student names.
Do this by going to the Instructions tab of any Class spreadsheet and editing the student list. Whilst you are there, enter the correct year above the students list.
Step 3: Register attendance
During each class, the teacher quickly takes roll directly inside their spreadsheet. There is a tab for each month of the year. The days of the month run across the top of the screen from left to right.
Using the dropdown menu under each day, the teacher selects whether each student is present (P) tardy or late (T) excused or absent (E) or unexcused (U).
Step 4: Automate your workflow
The student attendance tracker template contains pre-built Sheetgo connections that pull data from the Class spreadsheets straight into the Attendance management master sheet.
Every time you update (or run) the workflow, the data in the master sheet is refreshed with the latest information from the input spreadsheets. Do this manually by clicking Run in the tab with the main Attendance management workflow.
Slide the bar to Run automatically and select how often you want transfers.
Choose to transfer multiple times a day, once a day or once a month. Next, select your preferred time window and your time zone.
Check how many transfers per month your selection will approximately amount to at the bottom of the Settings tab.
Good job!
Your automated attendance template in Excel is now up and running!
Attendance template in Excel
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Looking for more ways to automate student administration tasks? Take a look at our Gradebook template in Google Sheets blog post (also available in Excel).
