Teams Attendee report in Power BI

Posted On 2021-02-10

Want to skip reading and just download the template and get started? Click here to download the PBIT-file!

For a while (and given your admin has made some PowerShell-magic), we’ve had Attendance report (not just Attendance List, available to download while still in the meeting). With this, you can download a summary of the attendance for the meeting after it’s over.

A few days ago I sat down with Mattias Kressmark at Microsoft, who by the way is the author of the blog above, and we discussed how this meeting report could use some Power BI touches. Out of the box the report is really crappy to be fair. With the ideas from Mattias and some nightly Power BI making hours it does’nt have to be though!

This is what it looks like in notepad, out of the box:

And below you have the Power BI version of it!

You can download the Power BI Desktop-application from Microsoft Store and add the CSV-file as a source, built stuff yourself OR you could just go ahead a copy my solution here! My result looks like this:

How to set up this report

Download the Power BI Template from here.

When you start the file in Power BI Desktop on your computer, you will meet this view:

In path, fill in the local path to your downloaded Attendee CSV-file. The search path might look like this:

C:\Users\VilleGullstrand\Downloads\meetingAttendanceReport(General).csv

When you’ve filled in your own path, click on the “Load”-button. That’s it! You’re done!

How to use this report?

In the top, you’ll see the name of the meeting based on the name from the downloaded file. You’ll see the amount of unique users who attended the meeting and this looks at the distinct values of email addresses, so if a user drops out and connects again, it will still be counted as 1 unique user.

Finally I add all the attending hours by looking at when a session started and ended and simply add those numbers together. More attendees and longer meetings means more consumed time for the meeting as a whole.

Next we have the timeline! We start on the timeline tab, as you can see on top of this visual. I use the as Timeline visual from AppSource here so credit to the author Antti Suanto!

This is meant to give you a visual representation of the attendance and exact numbers are not relevant here. Should you however need to now the exact minute someone joined or left, simply however over that bar.

In the bottom of this visual you can filter on role or attendee email address to narrow it down. You might for example want to compare how much overlapping time two specific users had in the meeting.

Clicking on the tab called Attendee details will switch out the timeline for a more detailed view. Every session is on the left and a summary is on the right. In here, unlike the call out value on top (see above), I split the amount of hours and the amount of minutes since it’s easier on the human eye.

To the far right you can see a percentage and this is calculated by first looking at the meeting start and end-time that we get from the first rows of the file. This is depending on the first attendee entering the meeting until the last attendee left. If this is the same person, you’ll see that attendee having 100% here. The next step of the calculation is to summarize how much time a specific user spent in the meeting and simply dividing the two.

If we go further down, to the bottom of the screen, you’ll have a chance to use a simplified built in tool to simulate a cost of this meeting. You can use the slicer to set your hours worth from 0 – 2 000 kr and this will then be multiplied with the amount of hours (including decimals) that was consumed as a total during this meeting by all attendees combined.

The idea is for you to get a better understanding of the ROI of this meeting. This is just subjective and nothing factual, but it will give you a hint on how much that workshop or the recurring check-in meeting is actually costing. Do you feel like you get more value than cost from your meeting? If not, there’s a ton of things you can do to make meetings more productive and I’ve shared some of these tips here on the blog. Another is to simply spend your time in something else than a meeting.

And that’s all! Feel free to evolve this report as much as you want, when you’ve added your own data, you will have full access to the measures and tables. Make any changes you like and save it as a .pbit-file to use it for your next meeting.

If you like it the way it is, simply open the .pbit-file whenever you want to analyze another meeting!

Any questions? Feel free to reach out! Cheers!