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Attendance tracker in one form (three activities)

  • June 15, 2026
  • 7 replies
  • 90 views

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Hi, we need to set up an attendance tracker (I know how to do the student and class dataset) for teachers to track students attendance in three activities each afternoon (same teacher tracks all three, and there are 6 teachers / classrooms). I know how I could do this in the form but are limited to each student with the three activities. I want to give the teachers a form to fill it that looks like a excel table, with all the students names on the left, and the three activities on the right for them to mark as present, absent, or partial. We do not want to use a portal as those are expensive. Will I need to use another application on top of this to do it? If so, which one if we want one place that the teachers go to for a drop down list of their classrooms, and then to fill out the matrix. 


In addition, how would you set up the attendance data table in airtable. Thanks!

7 replies

TheTimeSavingCo
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Does this look right?  If so I’ve set it up here for you to check out!


The idea is to have two tables: Students and Activity Log

The Students table will contain all the students we need to get the attendance of:


And the Activity Log will be a table where each record represents a single student’s attendance:

And the setup steps are:

  1. Create a Form in Activity Log and grab the form link
  2. Using that form link, create a Button field and construct a prefilled form link in the Students table
    1. 'https://airtable.com/appQ8wVOfh9prda87/pagM8Ej4VGSkkovy1/form' &
      '?prefill_Students=' & RECORD_ID()
  3. Create an Interface that displays the data from the Students table with the Button field visible
  4. Invite the teachers as read-only collaborators, which won’t incur any additional costs
  5. Teachers can now click on the ‘Submit Attendance’ button which will open the form and submit each student’s attendance

Let me know if you have any issues setting it up and I’ll do what I can to help!


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  • Author
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  • June 17, 2026

@TheTimeSavingCo Thank you so much for this. A couple of things. There is no way to set this up so all the students from one class are being clicked at the same time? So, like what you have developed, but it contains the list of everyone in the class? 

 

Secondly, they will need to do this over and over again over the semester. How does that look in the data table? 


TheTimeSavingCo
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There is no way to set this up so all the students from one class are being clicked at the same time? So, like what you have developed, but it contains the list of everyone in the class? 

I don’t think so I’m afraid.  For that I think you’d have to use a front end app to layer on top of Airtable like Zite or something.  Might still have to pay for it but would probably be cheaper than Airtable Portals depending on how many people you’ve got?

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Secondly, they will need to do this over and over again over the semester. How does that look in the data table? 

Each record in the Activity Log represents a single student’s attendance for however many activities you want to log, so it’d just be filled with that?  So sorry, I don’t understand the question!  Is there a specific issue you’re facing after putting in some example data?


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  • June 18, 2026

@TheTimeSavingCo  thanks again. I’m concerned about the number of records in the attendance sheet over time. If each time they fill it out if it is a separate row it will be thousands and thousands. So, I was thinking I could do wide data but I’m not sure that is an option? 

 


TheTimeSavingCo
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Hm, what would the fields be if you did that?


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  • June 23, 2026

@TheTimeSavingCoezcardinfo  thanks again. I’m concerned about the number of records in the attendance sheet over time. If each time they fill it out if it is a separate row it will be thousands and thousands. So, I was thinking I could do wide data but I’m not sure that is an option? 

 

Hi cna you tell me your point is solved?

 

 


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  • Author
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  • June 27, 2026

@TheTimeSavingCo ​@meri45clark 

I have decided to use zite/fillout form on top of airtable to address it. I’m still working on it. Thank you.