Downloading attendance reports in a Microsoft Teams meeting

One thing that has been missing from Microsoft Teams meetings is the ability to download a list of people who were on the call. That option is now available for the owner of the meeting so long as they download it before they leave the meeting. Here’s how that works…

Before you leave the meeting, click on the Ellipsis icon next to Participants, and select Download attendance list. Again, this is not an option once you leave the meeting:

The attendance list is downloaded as an Excel file formatted like this:

A colleague of mine described the report as “semi-useful after some manipulation.” As you can see, the report has an entry for every time someone joins or leaves, and it will record *every* time they join or leave. Also, if you allow anonymous users to join a call, they will be recorded with a blank value in the Full Name column.

Because of this, you need to plan on de-duplicating the names before you can get an accurate count of how many unique individuals were on the call. Also, if you’re allowing anonymous users, de-duplicating the names will reduce all your anonymous entries to a single line.

Is this better than what you had before? Yes. Is it a case of simply downloading the attendance list and counting the entries? No. You’ll probably need to “massage” the list before you’ll get the results you’re looking for…