Reusable Tasks - moving an process from excel workbooks to SharePoint

Question

My team use a SharePoint 2013 team site. Currently when we deliver training we use an excel workbook which tracks student names, and tracks their scores and has a standard task list of content that needs to be covered, as the trainer goes through each day of the training the mark off the content that been covered. There is a new workbook for every training.

I wanted to see if there was someway without coding that I could create some sort of reusable list or equivalent so that when a new class is set up I can create a new class list for that one class maybe like a task list but I don't want to have to type in every task every time there is a new class. Similar problem with projects, we follow the same steps for each elearning project we build so again a reusable project template would be helpful.

I know this is an odd question but I am fairly new to SharePoint and want to see if it can collect this data is an easier way. Any ideas would be really very welcome.

Answer 1

There are a lot of possibilities. In order to not shift the current paradigm too much, I would create a document library that has a content type associated with it that utilizes your existing excel file as a template.

This will allow people to create new instances of the form that seem to be working well for you so far. This gives you the benefit of adding additional columns to the document library to be able to sort and filter the content and to be able to add things like a seat count field that indicates how many people attended. Then you can roll those figures up to get total attendance by team or type etc.

All of the content would be centrally located.

Projects could work in a similar fashion with something like a document set.

With SharePoint there are a lot of ways to get to the end, others might have differing opinions and it'll be a matter of works for you and your group.