Seeking Help to Improve Attendance Tracking for a School System

[dondon]

Hello Airtable Community,

I'm in the process of transitioning from Google Sheets to Airtable to manage a dance school, with the aim of creating a more robust and streamlined system. I've successfully set up tables for students, classes, venues, staff, and periods (e.g., May 2024, June 2024). However, I'm encountering challenges with the attendance tracking system.

In our previous system on Google Sheets, attendance was tracked in a simple and user-friendly matrix format as follows for each month:

| May | 7/5 | 12/5 | 19/5 | 26/5 |

|------|----|-----|-----|-----|

| Student 1 | x | x | o | x |

| Student 2 | x | x | x | o |

| Student 3 | x | o | o | o |

For each subsequent month, we would simply copy the layout and update the dates, which were calculated automatically. This format allowed for easy visual and editing access to attendance.

In Airtable, I'm trying to normalize this data to improve the system's scalability and integrity. A normalized approach would ideally have records for each individual attendance date linked to student and class records.

ID_At	Class	Student	Date	Attendance
1	ClassTango	Student1	7/5	x
2	ClassTango	Student2	7/5	x
3	ClassTango	Student3	7/5	x
4	ClassTango	Student1	12/5	0
5	ClassTango	Student2	12/5	x
6	ClassTango	Student3	12/5	x
7	ClassTango	Student1	19/5	x
8	ClassTango	Student2	19/5
9	ClassTango	Student3	19/5	x
10	ClassTango	Student1	26/5
11	ClassTango	Student2	26/5
12	ClassTango	Student3	26/5

However, this normalized data structure introduces two main practical issues for our administrative staff:

1. **Lack of a comprehensive monthly view**: Staff need to switch screens to a pivot table interface to see the whole month's attendance, which is slow and cumbersome.
2. **Inefficient new student addition**: In the normalized structure, adding a new student requires entering their name across multiple date records, unlike the single entry needed in Excel.

**Question**: Is there a way in Airtable to visually edit and display attendance information in a format similar to Excel's grid, which is both comprehensive and editable on a single screen? While the timeline view is close, it repeats the student list for each date and is not quick or easy to edit.

Any advice, templates, or customization tips that could help mimic the usability of our old system while benefiting from Airtable's features would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

[Sistema_Aotearo]

Hello! Welcome to the community!

I can absolutely help with this! We're a music education programme that moved to Airtable a couple of years ago.

For attendance, I'd recommend building an interface for the teachers to click through and mark. You'll need first to figure out how you want to record this information on the back end.

How we've been doing it is through linked records. Link a student to a scheduled class to say they've been scheduled. But make another link field to say they've been present for that class. And you can make as many link fields to the Sudent's record as you want, one for each attendance option: Present, Absent, Late etc.

Now that you've got a way to record all the attendance details manually, you'll need to make it user-friendly and automate it.

User Friendly is where the interfaces come in. You can display your list of classes in lots of ways! Either a simple list, a calendar, or Kanban. You can also filter this by the user (teacher) so they only see their classes. Once you allow opening the record details of the classes, you can build the attendance UI. Add a system where teachers can select a number of students and click a button to trigger an automation to place them in the correct linked fields.

Building the automations to do this isn't too complicated. I'd be happy to run a Zoom call with you to show you how I've got mine built. Let me know!