Generic combined spreadsheet & sign-in sheet for attendance

Figure 1: sample of spreadsheet (click on image to view a larger version of it)

You can download it from the following link: generic-attendance-sheet.ods

Reasons you might want to use it

Ongoing visual feedback on attendance

The sign-in sheet is also a spreadsheet for calculating and showing attendance. Each attendance shows as a smiley on a green background and each absence shows as a frownie on red background, so it is easy for both students and instructors to see attendance trends. There are signature lines to help guide the students with messy handwriting. For each student there is an overall attendance summary of 0 or more smileys based on attendance percentage with a formula that the instructor can customize.
Seems to help with attendance

The students are reminded each time they attend of their attendance record, which helps because it is easy for a student to forget how many sessions they have skipped. The students write their signature in the blank area for future dates, so their eyes will generally pass over their attendance record as they sign in. Students get rewarded immediately for each attendance with a smiley. Students seem to take this sign-in sheet more seriously than they take an ordinary sign-in sheet.
Easy data entry for the instructor
- just type a 1 (“attended”) or 0 (“absent”) followed by Enter
- can set default attendance for each session
  
  If more than half attended, you can enter 1 as the default for a session and then only enter the 0's for the absent students, and vice versa when more than half were absent.
Attendance percent calculated overall and for each student, session, and week
Configurable for different session schedules

The start date, weekly schedule, and starting week number are configurable. The total number of sessions can be adjusted by deleting columns or inserting columns and copying existing columns on top of the newly inserted columns. The number of students is adjustable similarly. The spreadsheet contains configuration instructions.

What might be drawbacks for some people

Developed in LibreOffice and uncertain how well it works in Microsoft Excel

I tried saving it from LibreOffice using .xlsx format and then reloading it in LibreOffice, and the conditional styles (used for green/red backgrounds, week dividers, and signature lines) stopped working correctly. Everything else seemed fine. I'm pretty sure there are comparable features in Excel, so this is probably just a translator bug. I don't know how well Excel does at reading the .ods file (see Wikipedia for details on Excel's handling of OpenDocument spreadsheets), but if you absolutely can't run LibreOffice it might be worth just trying the file in Excel. Unfortunately, as of 2015-09 LibreOffice is not installed on our Windows machines. I believe you can probably just download and run your own copy of LibreOffice. Or you can try getting a graphical remote login to a Linux machine by following these instructions (which I guess by their URLs only work for people in the CS department?):

http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/cs/localinfo/facil/macs-cs-faq.html#Qexceed1
http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/cs/localinfo/facil/macs-cs-faq.html#Qnx
http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/cs/localinfo/facil/macs-cs-faq.html#Qx6

Other interesting points

Has been in regular use since the 2010/-11 academic year
Tries hard to use identical formulas that can be safely copied

This means generally it should work to modify just the first instance of a formula and either copy it down across all the students or to the right across all the session dates. Also, the row/column references are correctly relative or absolute so moving a row/column by cutting and pasting should mostly just work (e.g., maybe you want the overall figures at the top instead of the bottom).
Tries to stay away from difficult spreadsheet features, but doesn't completely succeed

The spreadsheet avoids using features like macros and array formulas. (I used both macros and array formulas in earlier versions but removed them to make the spreadsheet easier to manipulate.) The exception to this is the use of 2 kinds of conditional formatting, namely a user-defined conditional numeric format (“[>0]"☺";[<0]"";"☹"”) for displaying the smileys/frownies (the actual attendance data is just 1's and 0's), and conditional styles (for getting the green/red backgrounds, week dividers, and signature lines).