This article covers creating a progress tracker with Google Sheets. Progress trackers can be used for organizing or planning various things. Specially helpful if you have a team you need to monitor or if you are a teacher and you want to track the progress of your students. It is a fairly simple method and you can create a progress tracker for any activity. Like you can check the progress of your students for a task that was given to them. They can just update their progress through a Google Form and you will get the data in Google Sheets where you will be able to check how far along they are in completing their tasks.
Creating a Progress Tracker with Google Sheets:
Go to your Google Drive account and click on the “New” button given on the left side. From the new button menu, go to more, from there choose Google Forms, and then choose blank form. This can be seen in the screenshot above. You will get two options in Google Forms as you can see in the screenshot above.
From a template option will show you a collection of templates, as seen in the screenshot above, from where you can choose a form template you like. Whereas, Blank Forms will open up a new blank form as seen below.
We will start working with a blank form. Choosing a blank form will open a window like the one seen in the screenshot above. Now you can create your customized progress tracker. Like you can put in a title about something you want to track. Add questions which can be multiple choice, check boxes, or drop down menu ones. Once you have created a progress form, you can send it to people you want to track progress of. The completed form will look like the screenshot below.
Now you can send this form to your friends or students, if you are a teacher. They can fill up the form and submit their responses. When the responses start coming in you will be able to see them on the same page.
The Google Forms page also has a responses tab, where all the responses from the form are recorded in Google Sheets. The above screenshot shows the responses page right next to the questions tab. Here the responses are represented graphically as well as individual responses can be seen.
There is a green icon for Google Sheets in the right side corner, which can be clicked to open the responses data in to Google sheet format. Click this icon and create a Google Sheet out of the responses data. This can be seen in the screenshot above.
Now we are going to use the “Pivot Table” function to track the progress from this table. So you have to go to the Data menu on the top of the page and select Pivot Table option from it. A pop up window will come up asking you if you want to create the Pivot Table in a existing sheet or a new sheet. This can be seen in the screenshot above. Choose and click the create button.
This will open a new sheet and the pivot table editor window will open on the right side of the sheet. The pivot table editor can be seen in the screenshot above.
From the rows button in the editor choose the rows you want to display in this progress tracker and in what order can also be chosen. When you click the rows button a pop up window will open containing the titles of all the columns. You can choose which ones you want in the table and in which order.
Similarly, you will see a values button at the bottom of the pivot table editor. Click this button and select the column which you want to add up to know the progress. Like in the above table, I added up the number of articles written today, so I can track how many articles have been written and what is the target for the month.
That is it, you just created a progress tracker with Google Sheets.
Overview:
This a simple method using which you can create progress tracker with Google Sheets. Using the Pivot Table option is easy and it lets you make progress tracking in Google sheets simple. So try out this method to create progress trackers in Google Sheets.
