Administrative assistants are often asked to create and maintain systems to track a number of things: office supply orders; meetings; forms and petitions; and, in some offices, employee attendance. If you're asked to track employee attendance, you know it's important that your system is a good one. It must be logical, easy to use, and protected from user error.

Using the information that follows, you can learn to create and customize an attendance-tracking template for your office. Annette Marquis from TRIAD Consulting will walk you through step-by-step instructions in Microsoft Office Excel 2003 for building your worksheet, entering the right formulas, and even adding special features like conditional formatting, all of which will help you see and report attendance trends at a glance. You can also learn to work more efficiently with Excel templates in general by reading articles that discuss how to build them, how to add headings and labels, and how to keep worksheet and workbook elements protected from overwriting and mistakes. As a bonus, you even get a free sample attendance-tracking template to use as a hands-on example while you learn. You can easily customize this sample template to fit the exact attendance-tracking needs of your office.

Use these resources to increase your Excel template skills and create a better way to track employee attendance.

• Create an attendance-tracking template (Article)
  TRIAD Consulting gives you step-by-step instructions for building your own attendance-tracking workbook.
• Attendance tracking template (Template)
  Customize and use this Excel 2003 attendance-tracking workbook template.
• Create a template (Article)
  See how to create and save any template in Excel 2003.
• Edit data on multiple worksheets (Article)
  Change information on more than one worksheet simultaneously.
• Print row and column headings or labels on every page (Article)
  Learn to add headings and labels to your attendance-tracking workbook or any worksheet in Excel 2003.
• Protect worksheet or workbook elements (Article)
  Prevent others from overwriting formulas or other information by mistake.