Class Attendance Tracker

Attendance is one of those records that is trivial to keep and surprisingly hard to use. A paper register tells you who was in the room on a given day. What anyone actually asks for is the percentage per student across the term, which absences were excused, and who has dropped below the threshold that triggers a conversation. Working those out by hand from a register is an afternoon's job; this template does it as you mark.

The layout is a grid: students down the left, twenty sessions across the top, one letter in each cell. P for present, L for late, A for an unexplained absence, E for an excused one. Those four letters are a strict dropdown, because every figure on the sheet is a count of them and a stray lower-case p would silently drop a session out of the totals.

The handling of those four marks is where the template earns its place. Late still means the student was there, so it counts toward attendance while being tallied separately for anyone who needs that pattern. Excused absences come out of the denominator instead of counting against the student, which is how most attendance policies actually read and almost no simple spreadsheet gets right. Anyone below ninety percent has their name highlighted, and the summary strip counts how many students that is.