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Complete noob - looking for a sum!

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Tristan_Clause1
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

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):

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Kamille_Parks
16 - Uranus
16 - Uranus

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.

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2 Replies 2
Kamille_Parks
16 - Uranus
16 - Uranus

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!