How are most things made easier? Usually by doing some work ahead of time.
First thing to do is to have a spreadsheet for attendance. I suggest making a copy of this spreadsheet.
You need to get a list of your students. The easiest way to do this is to go into Canvas gradebook, and select Actions -> Export. It will download a .csv
file. In your Google Sheet, select File -> Import, then Upload, and select the file from Canvas. In the resulting dialog, change the first option (Import Location) to Insert New Sheet(s).
In order to get names alphabetized within sections, we have to do a bit of work. Delete the first two rows (they are unnecessary headers) and create a column to the right of student names (names should be in the A column, and the B column should be blank). First, sort by the A column (names), then sort by the F column (sect