master spreadsheet

[dshafique]

Hi everyone, I have a folder for my students, which has a folder for each individual student inside it containing their monthly progress. I wanted to know if there was a way for me to enter data in one "master" spreadsheet and it would auto-populate the individual reports. opening and manually opening each student's reports takes me all day, and uses up a lot of my time in class. I thought about linking the cells of each of the individual cells in the individual reports to a master spreadsheet, however my problem is that the number of students I have keeps changing (summer school). do you guys have any suggestions? this would really help me a lot.

 

[My Aswer Is This]

This is one of the problems you incur when you split out your data too much.
Do you really need a separate folder for each student? And then a Separate Workbook inside each folder.
Why not just have a separate sheet for each student. And all sheets in one workbook inside one Folder.
I cannot imagine working with maybe 20 students with separate folders which then has separate Workbooks which then has one or more sheets in each Workbook.

But then maybe you have a good reason for doing things this way.

 

[dshafique]

The reason I had it in separate folders was because I had it split by month. so each folder has a few spreadsheets, one for each month. like John's folder will have John June, john July, etc. I upload the folders to google drive, so parents can check their kids' progress whenever they want without bugging me. also seperate folders help me keep it clean and organized. I am open to suggestions however.
Another option i was thinking of (dont know how practical) is that i keep a master spreadsheet with all the students' points for the month, and at the end of the row, i can add a button which can auto populate the respective report for me.

pseudo code:
look for folder name based on value in a1 (where the kid's name will be)
look for file whose name contains "student name" + current month. open respective sheet and populate

again i dont know how practical that is.

 

[My Aswer Is This]

Well thanks for that explanation. I'm sure someone else here at Mr. Excel will see your question and be able to help you.
This is beyond my knowledgebase.
I will continue to monitor this thread to see what I can learn.