Any Excel genuises out there?

I keep track of my student's assignment deadlines using an Excel sheet. I use a separate worksheet for each student. Adding deadlines is a rely time consuming process, as I need to insert space, then copy and paste the assignment for each kid. Is there a more efficient way to do this? Say, insert a new entry in the line after a certain date for each worksheet at the same time? Thanks for your input!

There is definitely a more efficient way to do this. Can you post a picture of an example worksheet?... or at least describe the columns/rows in more detail?

Yeah, if you attach your file people here can probably figure it out. I'm no Excel genius, but I do have some experience (though I still discover new things all the time!).

I believe this may be what you're looking for,

Learn Paste Link function in Excel

hukdizzle said:

I believe this may be what you're looking for,

Learn Paste Link function in Excel

Click to expand...

This is probably the easiest way to get the data over. It basically creates a reference from one page to another. Two things I would recommend when using this approach would be:

• Make sure what you copy has room for future expansion. If you have ten assignments now (but will eventually have twenty later), include those cells that will have the future data. Otherwise, you'll be in the same boat later.
  
• Also, if you have the references going to empty fields, you'll get zeroes populating your students' worksheets. To hide these, go to the toolbar and select "Tools->Options". Under the view tab, uncheck "View Zero Values"

.

Hope this helps!

If the deadline is the same for each student, then linking the cell from one sheet would be easier/quicker. Other options would be changing the spreadsheet from one sheet per student, to one sheet per assignment, then copying the students to each assignment spreadsheet.

Overall, this sounds like something Access would handle much better. I know its more complicated to learn than Excel, but picking up a few tutorials online can make this type of tracking much easier.

Oh man, I hate links in spreadsheets that reference other workbooks. It is just asking for trouble later on.

I think the initial description needs to be fleshed out more instead of making assumptions about what is being described. The Paste Link feature sounds like overkill to me, as well as setting up stuff in advance and all that kind of crap. There is usually very little reason to have to set up extra spaces in advance in Excel, when you can easily use the "Insert" command to insert rows or columns when needed.

If it is one workbook and all the tabs are similar it is easy.

Hold control and click on each sheet you need to update. (or click on the first tab hold shift and click on the ending tab)
Then while the tabs are white(highlighted) do what you need to do in the one sheet and it should show in all of the sheets that are selected.

I do this for a salesperson tracker that I do every month.

Excel is my job.
I love pivot tables, v/h lookups, ect.