Starfish Pivot Instructions
Once you have downloaded the Attendance Report from Starfish, follow these instructions to
add an easy pivot table to see student attendance over time.
1. Open the attendance report in Excel and click on the ‘Student Attendance’ tab on the bottom.
2. Click on the column letter A and drag to column letter K. This will highlight all the data in these
columns. This should include information from ‘Student Name’ through to ‘Attendance Status’.
3. Click on the “Insert” tab in the top left and then the “PivotTable” icon.
4. A window will pop up with the title of “Create PivotTable”. It should default to look the same as
the photo below. If so, click “OK”. If not, make the required changes to make them match and
then click on “OK”.
5. Excel will now create a new tab (AKA worksheet) with an empty pivot table. On the right-hand
side, you will see the PivotTable Fields List.
Note: If at any point you lose the PivotTable Fields List, simply click on the PivotTable
on the left. If it still does not appear, click the “Field List” icon on the right side of the
PivotTable Analyze menu bar under “Show”
6. Click and drag “Student Name” from the top of the Fields list to the “Rows” box below. Then click
and drag “Attendance Status” into both the “Columns” and “Values” boxes.
a. If you wish to organize your list by Student ID instead of Student Name, simply click and
drag “Student ID” from the list and place it in the “Rows” box.
b. Pivot tables make it easy to view your information in different ways. Feel free to click and
drag fields into different areas to see which combination works best for you and your
needs. It doesn’t change any information so you can always revert to these settings.
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7. Your pivot table will now appear! You’ll see each student in their own row and each unique
attendance status in its own column. The numbers in the table are the number of times each
student is recorded for each attendance status.
a. For example, Student 1 has one record of “Absent” and one record of “Present”. Student
10 has zero records of “Absent” and two records for “Present”
b. Clicking on the down-arrow buttons next to “Column Labels” and “Row Labels” lets you
easily filter certain values out. You may wish to deselect “(blank)” for a cleaner look.
Congratulations! You’ve created a pivot table!
For faculty purposes, in order to capture the most recent attendance
data, you will have to
generate another attendance report and create
the pivot table again.
In general, when adding and/or changing information in the workbook the pivot table doesn’t change! So
you can update your pivot table by simply clicking on your pivot table and then the Refresh icon. Your pivot table
will automatically update with the latest data. Again, this is only if you continue to use the same excels
spreadsheet/workbook.
