In this article, we'll show how to organise Users into a Group so they can be excluded from Power BI reports. This means your admin team can have confidence that reports include data for the right people only.
This is typically most relevant when reporting compliance using the Learning Progress report (for example to exclude admin accounts from summary compliance metrics); however, the principle and steps described apply to all Power BI reports, including Perform reports.
We'll cover:
- What Users might need to be excluded?
- Steps to exclude LMS admin accounts from reporting
- Review how LMS administrators are assigned learning
- How the security model will restrict what people see in reports
What Users might need to be excluded?
Every organisation is different, however, there are some common reasons why it might be necessary to exclude Users from reporting include:
- People with SEN (special educational needs)
- Non-Exec Directors who sit in the company structure but need exclusion
- Users who are absent long term from the business
- Suspended employees
- Administrator/test accounts
LMS administrators/test accounts
LMS administrators often have a separate User account to use when performing admin tasks. This ensures their training record as an everyday employee is kept separate from activities they perform as an administator (for example testing and launching courses).
The Kallidus support team also have LMS admin accounts in every Learn site, in order that they can help resolve questions and queries as they arise.
It's quite possible that these Admin accounts might be assigned mandatory learning along with all other people in your organisation.
Steps to exclude Users from reporting
For this example, we'll show how to exclude LMS administrator accounts from reporting. If you have more Users to exclude from reporting, the same steps can be followed to organise Users into groups, and unselect from reports.
- Create a Group in Learn LMS
- Give the Group a meaningful title, for example 'Kallidus admin accounts'
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Add Users to the Group (in this example, that's LMS administrators). Note that it is possible to add Users manually, or create a Group rule to add Users, including the option to add Users based on their LMS role:
-
Browse to Reports:
- Open a report
- Select the Group title filter:
- Select Select all:
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Search for the Group containing the admin accounts:
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Unselect the Group containing the admin accounts. Note the filter description now shows that a Group is excluded:
- Repeat steps 8 and 9 for any further Groups that should be excluded
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Create a new View for the report with a title that reflects the excluded Groups (for example 'Default view - excluding admins':
- Set the view as default if required
Review how LMS administrators are assigned learning
The above steps show how to exclude LMS administrators from reporting. It may also be helpful to check how LMS administartors are getting assigned learning, to see if this can be completly avoided.
A common reason might be because Courses are assigned to the default 'All Users' Group.
We recommend that learning is never assigned to this Group, as you cannot control membership. It will always contain every enabled User. The only way to remove a User is to unenable their account. Instead, consider creating an 'All company' Group - for which you can control Group membership as required.
How to identify assigned Courses
To identify Courses assigned to administrators, run the Learning Progress report and apply the 'Group' filter, to show only the 'Administrators' Group, and see how many Courses are assigned, and which Courses they are.
Review mandatory assignments, elective assignments or both using the pre-applied filter called 'Course is mandatory?'.
How the security model will restrict what people see in reports
Note that the security model will ensure that Users will only see the right people in reports, and this will typically mean that LMS admins are excluded from reports for most people.
However, it is possible to give Users access to view all data in reports, so their view of the data is equivalent to that of an LMS administrator - even if their role would usually prevent it. Where that’s the case, the above steps will ensure LMS administrator accounts are always excluded from reports.
Discover more about reporting with Power BI
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