How to use MS Teams Attendance Report?
Today I’m not only going to show you how you can keep track MS teams attendance report but also show you how to download an attendance after finished a meeting.
If you have already started using Microsoft Teams, it’s likely that you’re now very familiar with video calls and Teams Meetings so, if you are looking to track attendance in Microsoft teams meeting, you’ll love this new guide.
Let’s jump right in.
- Well let’s say you’re a teacher, what you could do is you could see when students joined your class on teams and when they dropped off or maybe a student snuck out in the middle and you could see when they left and when they rejoined you get all of that information. Or maybe you work at a workplace and one of your coworkers was unable to attend your meeting.
- You could use an attendance report to verify that and maybe you follow up with recording after the fact so whatever your reason is it’s very easy to keep track of attendance.
I’ll show you step by step how you can do that. Now to be able to track Microsoft teams attendance two things need to be true.
- One of them you have to be the meeting organizer to be able to see the attendance. So let’s say your teacher. You can download the attendance report but none of your students will be able to download the attendance report and make sense.
- Secondly, your admin also has to enable attendance reports in teams.
- So as long as those two things are in place you’ll be able to download attendee reports.
Alright. I have MS teams app app open and let’s pretend that maybe I’m a teacher. Here are my weekly schedule and I only teach one class a week and the class focuses on Microsoft teams basics. I’m sure all my students will need to attend the class which starts at 6:00 a.m.
I want to track how many people are showing up so I’m going to click into this meeting details. Here you can see that I have five different students in this class.
I’m the teacher and the organizer of this meeting. I’m going to join the class to see who else is hopping on there. I’m now in the meeting and waiting for other people to join.
One of my students for my class. Her name is Emily and she knows I keep track of attendance in fact if she clicks into the calendar invite here she’ll see some message that says remember you won’t want to miss this lecture.
As I keep track of attendance after seeing that Emily is going to want to make sure that she joins the class. So here Emily is in the class and here I want to click on Show participants and you can see that we’re both in this class now.
What I’m going to do now is let’s say that Emily joins for a few moments and she just really can’t stand in this subject matter. So she’s actually going to go ahead and drop out of the class. Now I’m going to go back to my view or the professors view and what we see up here is right now I’m the only attendee left I see that Emily hopped on and then she dropped right back off.
So let’s say that you know where I can simply look at it and I know that Emily joins but what if you have a large class with maybe a 50 or 60 people. It’ll be hard to keep track of who is there and who wasn’t there and if someone came late or someone left early.
How to download Microsoft teams meeting attendance report?
What we can do is up here in the people pivot. Click on the More options (…) in the top right hand corner and click Download attendance list.
What I’m gonna do is let’s go ahead and click on this and what will happen is teams will download an attendance list file and it looks like teams have successfully downloaded it.
Now I’m going to open up file explorer and where teams puts it is in the downloads folder. So if I go to downloads I’m going to click on that here I see that I have a meeting attendance list and if you download multiple ones of it it’ll simply append the next number in the series hereafter the title something to go ahead.
Let’s click on this report. It’s a CSV file so a comma separated file so what it’s gonna do is here it is opening it for me in Microsoft Excel. Here you can see I’m the teacher or the professor and I joined the meeting at 3.52 p.m. and then I could see that about a minute later Emily joined which is 3.53 pm.
But what I don’t understand is why she left my class so quickly as my content not interesting enough here. This report does show you when people join and when they leave. It effectively gives you a way where you can track attendance.
I’m going to rejoin as Emily Elena and I want to show you how as a student you’re unable to get this same report. She’s connecting and once again to get the report you go through the participant view. But in this case, there’s no similar icon here for Emily because Emily is one of the students and you probably don’t want students downloading the attendance reports you want to limit that to the teacher or to whoever’s organizing the meeting.
Alright. That was a really quick example of how you can track attendance using MS teams app. You can simply export a comma separated value file which you could open that in Excel or any other application that can open that file type and then you could use that to see who is there and who wasn’t there and how long people were there.
How to download Microsoft teams attendance after meeting?
Not being to download the meeting report after the meeting was frustrating and the below steps will help you.
- In Teams, navigate to the class team and Select + to add a new tab
- Select Insights from the displayed options, or search for Insights from the search bar.
- Select “Add“
- Since students don’t have access to Insights, uncheck the option to Post to the channel about the tab, then select Save.
- If you’re adding the Insights tab to a class that’s already been active for a while, you may see data collected from past class activity. Newer classes won’t reflect a lot of data initially, but as your class is more active in Teams, you’ll see more data in Insights.
- Select track student activity
- Click three dots (…) on the right hand side and select Export to Excel.
- The file will be downloaded into your downloads folder
- Now, you have a report of students who joined and left a meeting.
Additional information
- Insights will surface activity data from all channels within a class team, but can only be added as a tab to public channels.
- Insights is available in class teams only and cannot be added to staff or PLC teams.
- If you get a message that your account has opted out of Insights, your IT admin has turned it off. IT Admins, learn how to enable Insights here.
Enable attendance report globally
With this feature enabled, meeting organizers can view and download a meeting attendance report both during meeting and after the meeting. During the meeting you can find the in the Participants pane of the meeting, by clicking the download arrow which downloads the attendance report in CSV format. After the meeting an attendance report will automatically appear in the meeting chat.
Below is an example of what the meeting organizer will see in the meeting chat:
To enable the Attendance Report on the Global policy run the following cmdlet:
Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity “Global” -AllowEngagementReport Enabled
To confirm the Attendance Report has been enabled run the following cmdlet:
Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity “Global” | Select AllowEngagementReport
Backout Plan:
To disable the Attendance Report on the Global policy run the following cmdlet:
Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity “Global” -AllowEngagementReport Disabled
To confirm the Attendance Report has been disabled run the following cmdlet:
Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity “Global” | Select AllowEngagementReport
How to access and use these commands?
Connect to Skype for Business Online module and after you enter your password to connect, you will now have access to all the commands and many other items with Teams.
MS teams attendance report is a pretty useful tool to track participants. For more information, visit the Microsoft website.
Also Read: How to use the Breakout rooms on Microsoft teams?
