Choice of application (Excel or Access) for attendance tracking

**Ramzess** · 11-04-2011, 12:26 PM

Dear all,

I have an idea of what I'd like to do but don't know for sure what application would be the best for the purpose. Other aspect is that I do have Excel and don't have Access.

I am fairly basic user of both Excel and Access that is why I don't know if what I'm aiming for is achievable within Excel (via formulas, macros, vba)

In attached files you'll see a template provided by Microsoft (Attendance.xls)
and a mix of a few templates I created as that i more close to what I'm looking for (EAD-2012.xls)

I would like to keep a track of attendance of employees and then sum it and be able to review in in a visual way (as in EAD-2012.xls) so I can see attendance for a particular employee over a whole year, look for patterns (weekends for example).

In Attendance.xls there are cells for a person's data entry above what I really like.

Now I am thinking - would that be possible to create using Excel - a enduser interface (like Attendance.xls) where I can pick a employee using dropdown list (filter?) and filter out his attendance data.

There is another way I see this can be done - in EAD-2012 workbook named "approach1" I just copy-pasted the attendace matrix and put employee number and name in front of it, then I used filter to filter out by name or number.

I bet there is more efficient way of doing this, as well as more user friendly but is it Excel to do something like this in?

**Ramzess** · 11-05-2011, 11:23 AM

Anybody? Any ideas?

**MarvinP** · 11-05-2011, 12:05 PM

Hi Ramzess and welcome to the forum,

Excel comes witht he standard Office bundle while Access does not.
I'd suggest Excel as it may be more versitile for other applications and the learning curve is less steep.

The output for Student Attendance and Approach 1 are not using Excel's best features. Excel works best with TABLES of data. A simple three column table would be sufficient (perhaps) for your needs.
1. Name
2. Date
3. Reason for Absence

I'd only enter names, dates and reasons for days the employee/student were absent. Then I'd do Filters or Pivot Tables to analyse my data.

I hope this helps.

**Aftab Iqbal** · 11-05-2011, 03:52 PM

Hi Ramzess

I created a holiday leave tracker at the place I work. I can send you a copy if you provide your email address and see if that's what you are looking for.