Reporting - How do I exclude specific Users from reporting?

*** Please note, this article refers to the All-new Reporting and Analytics. View the FAQ for more details. ***

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.

1. Create a Group in Learn LMS
2. Give the Group a meaningful title, for example 'Kallidus admin accounts'
3. Add LMS administrators to the Group. 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:
4. Browse to Reports:
5. Open a report
6. Select the Group title filter:
7. Select Select all:
8. Search for the Group containing the admin accounts:
9. Unselect the Group containing the admin accounts. Note the filter description now shows that a Group is excluded:
10. Repeat steps 8 and 9 for any further Groups that should be excluded
11. Create a new View for the report with a title that reflects the excluded Groups (for example 'Default view - excluding admins':
12. 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.

Find out more about reporting and analytics with Microsoft Power BI

Join us live for Key techniques for using Power BI fixed reports in The Academy. We'll start with a tour of the Power BI reporting area, then, we’ll open up the Learning Progress report and using real-life examples, we’ll dive into the detail.

If you're using Reporting and Analytics already and have a question, come along to our 'Ask me Anything' events in the Academy to ask questions and share feedback directly with the team.

Join us for our update and roadmap live event to see the latest feature releases and roadmap for the next quarter and share feedback directly with the team. 

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