Creating a Teaching Schedule in Airtable

[Yossi_Goldblatt]

I currently have a google sheet with teachers names as columns and time slots as rows and the students name is the cell. Is there an easy way to replicate this printable view in Airtable? I need to be able to print that out daily for staff - but really the data is Airtable based. Love some genius insight! TY

[Databaser]

Hi @Yossi_Goldblatt and welcome back!

You could make something like this:

You can then make and print the calendar view. It looks something like this:

Every item only shows the first field, so you could adjust that one by concatenating, and/or you could work with conditional color (eg, per teacher) for better visualisation.

You could also take a look at the Scheduler app from @Kamille_Parks.

Of course, depending on the number of students and teachers involved :slightly_smiling_face:

[Justin_Barrett]

@Yossi_Goldblatt Do you still need help with this, or was the suggestion from @Databaser able to get you where you need to go?

[Yossi_Goldblatt]

The challenge is that this is a daily/weekly schedule not based on dates. And it gets changed regularly. e.g. teacher John teachers student Emily every Monday from 9:30 to 10:15. Then a few weeks later, Emily no longer needs this extra class and student Sarah is put in instead.
Any thoughts on this?

[Justin_Barrett]

From your initial post it sounds like the sticking point is getting that setup to be printable. If you build a setup in an Airtable grid view that’s similar to your original Google Sheets layout, you can print that view directly as-is. Next to the name of the view in the main view toolbar, click the down arrow and choose “Print view”. Make sure that you choose “Fit to page width” for the column sizing option, and set your page layout to be “Landscape”, which will give you a printout that should look exactly like your grid view.

If that doesn’t give you what you want, then please provide more details on your setup (# of teachers, # of timeslots, # of students, etc.) and anything else that will help us to hone in on a solution.

[Yossi_Goldblatt]

It’s a combination. See screenshot below of current google sheet - super simple and easy to use. I had to blur names for privacy reasons.

This is easy to print, easy to read and easy to change.
Is there any way to replicate this as close as possible in Airtable?
I have tried the Matrix app but you can’t resize the rows or print.

[Databaser]

Yossi_Goldblatt:

This is easy to print, easy to read and easy to change.

Then why would you want to recreate it in Airtable? Airtable is nog Google Sheet… :thinking:

[Yossi_Goldblatt]

B/c I am using airtable for the data about each student, records of what was taught, communicating with parents. reports etc.

[Justin_Barrett]

While it’s awesome that you’ve found a use for Airtable in your work, there are many things about that spreadsheet design that can’t currently be replicated in Airtable:

• Dynamic row heights. There is a single setting in the view toolbar that applies a given height to all records.
• Merged cells. Airtable isn’t a freeform grid. Each row is a record that’s independent of every other record, and each field is part of that record. Fields aren’t independently-designable entities like they are in a spreadsheet, which also explains why you can’t do…
• Individual cell coloring. Airtable’s only record-coloring features simply applies a colored marker to the left of each record. Background colors can’t be customized.

To clarify, these formatting options aren’t possible natively. There may be third-party tools that can take Airtable data and generate similar output to your current Google Sheets design, but I haven’t played enough with the available third-party tools to know if those formatting options are even possible.

If you’re willing to live without those three items that I mentioned above, then you could probably get Airtable to work for you, but there’s not much to say in terms of how to execute it: make your records (rows) for the time slots that you want, and make the fields (columns) for the teachers as text fields (either single line or long text depending on your needs). Edit the data as needed, and print as often as you like (probably using my print suggestion above so that everything fits on a single page). That’s about it. You’re not really using Airtable’s database-like features in this kind of design, but you apparently need the flexibility to add and edit text at will, so none of these fields can be link fields. Displaying stuff in arbitrarily-sized blocks of time works great in calendar views, but your columns need to be teachers, not days of the week, and there’s currently no other way in Airtable to create that kind of free-flowing design, soooooo…???

Yossi_Goldblatt:

Love some genius insight!

In the end, I can’t really think of any “genius insight” to apply here because what you want is spreadsheet-like behavior in a database-like application, which I’m afraid isn’t going to happen.