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Hi folks,


Formulas aren’t my strong suit, but I’m hoping there’s a way I can do this. Essentially, I’m helping my school manage teacher assignments, so I’m building a simple database to help me organize and visualize this data. I have two tables: 1 for Courses and 1 for Teachers. I have them linked together such that if in the Courses Table I type in a teacher’s name, then that course will show up on the Teacher’s tab (and vice versa). In the Course tab each course has a numerical value assigned to it based on the number of times per week they meet. What I would like is a column that tabulates the total number of periods assigned to a teacher that is calculated based on the courses assigned to that teacher. Does anyone have any formulas that can do it? I was hoping a lookup field would be a sneaky shortcut, but no luck. See my attached screenshots (I’ve cut off the teacher names field for privacy’s sake):

You’re looking for a Rollup, Lookup’s often times more useful cousin. If you want to display data from linked records, use a Lookup. If you want to calculate data from linked records, use a Rollup.


Rollups are essentially formula fields to calculate values based on linked data. In your case, in the Teachers table you’d create a Rollup field pointing to the Courses’ Table’s “Value” field and use the SUM(values) aggregation.


You’re looking for a Rollup, Lookup’s often times more useful cousin. If you want to display data from linked records, use a Lookup. If you want to calculate data from linked records, use a Rollup.


Rollups are essentially formula fields to calculate values based on linked data. In your case, in the Teachers table you’d create a Rollup field pointing to the Courses’ Table’s “Value” field and use the SUM(values) aggregation.


Brilliant!! Thank you–so simple!


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