Hey everyone! I need help setting up a comprehensive tracking system in Google Sheets for our organization. We want to monitor participant attendance across multiple events spanning several years, and I’m wondering if this is feasible.
Currently we use separate sign-in sheets for each event, but I want to consolidate everything into one master spreadsheet. My idea is to list all participants vertically on the left side, then have event names as column headers across the top. Each cell would show whether someone attended that specific event, possibly with checkmarks or colored cells.
We’re looking at roughly 500-600 individuals and around 80-90 events total. I’ve used COUNTIF formulas before for smaller projects connected to Google Forms, but this seems much more complex.
The goal is to have one centralized sheet where we can see attendance patterns, calculate total events per person, and analyze our program effectiveness instead of checking multiple separate files.
Has anyone built something similar? What formula approach would work best for this scale? Any tips on structure or automation would be really helpful!
Honestly, I’d skip the COUNTIF formulas and go with pivot tables for something this big. Ran into the same issue last year - COUNTIFS crawled with that many records. Set up one master sheet with name, event, date, and attended (Y/N) columns, then build your pivot tables from there. Way faster than formulas across a massive grid, plus you can slice the data any way you want without everything grinding to a halt.
Try Google Sheets’ built-in attendance template instead of starting from scratch. I did something similar for our training department and went with a hybrid approach - kept the grid layout but only showed active participants. The trick was using dynamic named ranges with INDIRECT functions instead of static COUNTIF formulas everywhere. You’re only calculating what’s actually needed when someone looks at it. With 500+ people, I’d split it into quarterly or yearly tabs rather than one giant sheet. Performance is way better, and it’s easier to manage when you need to archive old events. Also use conditional formatting for visual indicators instead of formulas - Google Sheets handles that much better than calculating cell by cell. Just set up data validation on your entry points so inconsistent naming doesn’t break your lookup formulas later.
I built something similar for a nonprofit, just smaller scale. With 500+ participants and 80+ events, you’re gonna hit performance issues fast once you add formulas across all those cells. Here’s what worked for us - don’t structure it like you’d think. Skip the massive grid with participants as rows and events as columns. Instead, make a separate data entry sheet where each row is one attendance record: participant name, event name, date, attendance status. Then use COUNTIFS and SUMIFS on summary sheets to get your analytics. This scales way better since you’re not dealing with 40,000+ cells that need populating or calculating. Your summary sheets can still show participant totals, event attendance rates, whatever metrics you want - just without the performance hit. Google Sheets gets sluggish around 2 million cells with formulas. Your original structure would burn through that fast. The relational approach keeps things snappy and makes data entry easier too.