Thread: Needing to find ways of automating simple processes

Hello all this is my first post to this forum! And it may surely be the first of many because I could benefit much from knowing certain things in Excel.
We use excel as a sign in sheet at the non-profit I work at. We have a front desk person that manually enters the first and last name of each attendee, as well as some other data. Each person that enters also has an ID number in our Filemaker Pro system.
We also use excel to aggregate our data for monthly reports, including how many times a single visitor has attended our program in a given month. Currently, this is counted manually.
I would love:
- For us to have some automation in place, so that when you enter someone's name their ID appears in the adjacent column
- For Excel to possibly give a list of choices to choose from when entering someone's name, so that we can't misspell a name and thus have inconsistent representation of someone's name on a list.
- For Excel to be able to aggregate data particular to one person in a more streamlined way. As I mentioned above, to track one person's total visits in a month, we need to visually scan each day down the list, and manually count the times that name appears.

Are there any suggestions as to how to begin to make this spreadsheet work for us rather than sucking a lot of time up?
Thanks!
Max

Can you provide some sample data and what you want? The more specific you are in your request, the easier is it to assist you.

from the sounds of it, there are a ton of options (countif's, auto complete, lookups, etc) that could help you with this. However, as mentioned above, some sample data/results would make it possible to assist you better

Thanks,
Attached is a sample with a month or so of data that we input. Obviously, we are not using all the columns present. The main columns we use are from the leftmost until the "time" column.
You can see that there are many different individuals that we are signing in and out.,
Here is a more specific array of what I would love to know how to do:

Find out how many days student X has visited this month.
Find out how many hours this student has spent here.
Find out someone's average time per visit
Find out total hours of visits amongst everyone

* The other thing I was wondering about was making this document know the names of students so that we couldn't say, sign a student in and mispell their name from one day to the next, thus screwing up all the counting that excel would be doing when it counts the monthly totals of that person's data.


That alone is a great starting point, as most of that stuff is counted manually, for example, how many times tyler has visited in the month of january.
thanks again for anything anyone can show me on this.

I know this is long out of date, but I decided to play with it and see if I could come up with a different sollution...