Forum Discussion
Tips for Quicker Data Entry?
Hey!
In my current post, I’m using excel to monitor ‘student attendance’ This means that along the First row, there is a list of ‘student numbers’, and the following columns contain their names, and dates, which I place a ‘1’ in, and then use conditional formatting to have the corresponding cells turn green.
Currently, I’m using the find function to manually type in those student numbers, find their row, and fill in their attendance information for that week. But with over 300 students, this is very time consuming.
Is there a way to input this data more quickly?
NB, we use barcode scanners to scan student cards, which I can then apply a macro to have it populate those cells automatically. But we still take manual registers for some classes, and students don’t always remember to bring their student cards.
3 Replies
Sebastian,
If you have an electronic copy of the attendance information saved in Excel file, then you can use some lookup formulas to retrieve the attendance information for each student into the master worksheet.
If not, it is inevitable to enter those data manually!
But you can speed this process as much as possible with some tips.
So please tell us what the attendance information details?
Is it only present/absent? Or something else?
Hi Hathyam,
Unfortunately this data is hard copy, but I am only inputting present or absent present as a ‘1’ and absent as a ‘0’. Ideally I was hoping there would be some way that I could simply type in their ‘student ID Numbers’ continuously, and excel would find the corresponding row, and input in a 1’ for that date.
I a 1 isn’t present then I fill in the 0’s later, which isn’t too much of a problem. It’s just putting 1’s in randomly through a list of 2-400 people is quite time consuming.
Presently I use find to find the student ID, and then manually click and enter a ‘1’ into the cell.
Certainly, the numbers of attendees will be more than absentees!
So I suggest that you assume that they are all present, and then you identify the absentees!
You can fill them all with 1 with simple operations like copy and paste, or you can use the https://support.office.com/en-us/article/display-or-hide-the-fill-handle-80918200-9ae9-4615-93c9-13d4f1496f81!
After that find the absentees and mark them.
In addition, I advise you to use this hidden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cc7lUDLrXE, which is helpful to speed the data entry process!
