We’re all staying at home right now for our safety due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But that does not mean we are sitting idle. People are either working from home right now or attending online classes for schools and universities and video conferencing apps like Google Meet are to thank for making it all possible.

A lot of users have flocked to Google Meet to conduct remote meetings and classes causing an almost explosive surge in its growth. Apart from the features that the app offers, a big reason why people use it instead of other video meeting apps that offer more features is the big store of Google Meet extensions that add more functionality to the platform.

One such Chrome extension that augments the Google Meet experience, especially for teachers is ‘Meet Attendance‘. Using Meet Attendance, you can capture the attendance for the meeting without having to do much. It is a really useful tool for teachers and managers who need to keep a record of everyone in the meeting. You can install the extension on any browser that supports Chrome Web Store extensions like Google Chrome, New Microsoft Edge browser, Brave, etc.

Meet Attendance creates and uses Google Sheets with the date and time stamps to capture a meeting attendance in Google Meet. Go to the Chrome Web Store and search for ‘Meet Attendance’, or click here to open it. Then, click on the ‘Add Chrome’ button to install it on your browser.

A confirmation dialogue box will appear on your screen. Click on ‘Add extension’ to give permissions and install it. The extension will install and its icon will appear on the right side of the Address Bar of your browser.

The icon will be black and white when it is not in use, but it’ll turn red once it’ll be in use in Google Meet.

Left: Extension icon when not in use.
Right: Extension icon when in use on Google Meet.

Now, in a Google Meet meeting, you will find an extra icon under the ‘People’ icon. The first time you use the Meet Attendance extension, you will need to sign in with your Google account. The Google account you use is the account that will be used to create Google Sheets.

Then, it will ask for permission to access your account to be able to create and manage a Google Sheet attendance in your Google Drive. Click on ‘Allow’ to grant permissions and start using Meet Attendance.

Then, click on the ‘People’ icon and it will capture the attendance on its own. If there are a lot of people in the meeting, you might have to scroll the list to capture complete attendance.

The names of the participants in attendance will be recorded in the Google Sheet along with the date, and time of the attendance captured, and the meeting details.

Every time you open the ‘People’ section, it will capture and record attendance along with the time stamp in the Google Sheet as a new column.

There will be an extra icon next to the People icon in the ‘People’ tab with the Meet Attendance extension installed. Click on it to view more options for the extension.

Click on the icon once again to open the current Google Sheet being used to record the attendance.

There are also a few extra options available. If you don’t want the extension to record the attendance every time you open the ‘People’ tab, click on the toggle switch to turn it off. Turn on the toggle again when you want to capture the attendance again.

You can also add a new sheet to the current Google sheet capturing the attendance. Click on the first icon on the left next to the toggle switch. The new sheet created will be used to capture attendance. You can view the old sheet from the bottom of the Google Sheet.

To create a completely new Google Sheet for the current meeting, click on the second icon from the left. Now, every time the attendance is captured again, it will be recorded in this spreadsheet.

Meet attendance is a brilliant tool that can come in very handy when conducting online classes and meetings to keep a count of who attended. You can use this extension for yourself, or you can also ask the organization’s G-Suite admin to roll out the extension to necessary parties like teachers if you are in a school or managers for organizations. All the attendance sheets will be available in your Google Drive.