Monday, July 28, 2025

Training and Compliance Report

The Training and Compliance report provides a consolidated view of training completion, compliance performance, Team Member Orientation (TMO), exception requests, and training-related administrative leave activity. It helps Training leadership monitor workforce training requirements, identify compliance risks, review orientation outcomes, and support operational and IDT review activities.

Overall Summary

The Overall Summary page serves as the executive dashboard for training performance and compliance monitoring. It provides a consolidated view of training completion, compliance, orientation activity, exception requests, and administrative leave metrics.

The page allows users to:

  • Review overall training completion percentages.
  • Monitor training compliance percentages.
  • Review Team Member Orientation metrics.
  • Monitor exception-request activity.
  • Review training-related administrative leave activity.
  • Analyze trends across the previous 13 calendar months.

Completion / Compliance

The Completion / Compliance page serves as the primary compliance-monitoring page for workforce training. It focuses on assigned coursework, completion performance, overdue training, and compliance outcomes.

The page allows users to:

  • Monitor employee training completion rates.
  • Review compliance percentages.
  • Identify overdue training requirements.
  • Analyze assigned versus completed courses.
  • Review training performance by employee and job title.

    


Compliance Hold

The Compliance Hold page serves as the monitoring page for training-related administrative leave and compliance hold activity. It helps Training leadership identify employees whose training status may be affected by extended leave periods.

The page allows users to:

  • Monitor employees on administrative leave.
  • Review leave durations and trends.
  • Identify employees on extended leave.
  • Analyze leave activity over the previous 13 calendar months.
  • Monitor the impact of leave on compliance status.


Exception Requests

The Exception Requests page serves as the operational review page for training exception requests. It tracks submitted exceptions and their approval status, helping leadership monitor alternative training arrangements and compliance exceptions.

The page allows users to:

  • Review exception requests submitted by staff.
  • Monitor approval and denial rates.
  • Analyze exception-request trends over time.
  • Review exception descriptions and status.
  • Monitor exception activity by location and caseload.


Team Member Orientation

The Team Member Orientation page serves as the primary monitoring page for Team Member Orientation participation, graduation, retention, and completion trends. It provides visibility into employee progression through orientation and onboarding activities.

The page allows users to:

  • Monitor employees entering Team Member Orientation.
  • Track orientation graduation rates.
  • Review retention rates for orientation participants.
  • Analyze days spent in orientation.
  • Monitor employees still completing courses.
  • Review self-selected and selected-out participants.


Version Notes

The Version Notes page serves as the technical and administrative reference page for the report. It documents report calculations, business rules, enhancement history, data-source changes, and maintenance information.



Friday, July 25, 2025

Power BI Report Date Display - Snack 7

It is time for another Snack!  Let's get back to that data we loaded several weeks ago.

Go to Power BI Service online, access "My Workspace," and click on the name of the report we are working on.  

If you are using the same sample data that I am, it is probably called "FinancialSample" or whatever you named it.  The type is a "Report."

It looks like a plain old ordinary table, right now.  It is nothing exciting, so we should start forming into something that is.

If you only added the date column last time, go ahead and add more.

The last time we were here, I added the following:

  • Date
  • Sales
  • COGS
  • Country
  • Discount Band
  • Gross Sales
  • Manufacturing Price
  • Product
  • Profit
  • Sale Price
  • Units Sold
Viewing these, some of the column names may include "Sum of ..."

This is all OK.

Also, remember the Date is going to appear divided out by Year, Quarter, Month, and Day.

Today, we are going to fix that!
  1. Click the EDIT button at the top of the page.
    1. You should three panels appear on the right. 
      (One or more might be collapsed.  Don't worry about that too much.)
      1. Filters
      2. Visualizations
      3. Data
  2. Click on the data table on the screen so that the table visualization is selected.
  3. Under the Visualizations panel, find the column that shows,
    1. Date
      1. Year
      2. Quarter
      3. Month
      4. Day
    2. Click the itty-bitty down arrow to the right of where it says "Date"
      1. A menu appears that shows the following (or more items),
        1. Remove field 
        2. Move >
        3. Show items with no data
        4. Date
        5. ✓ Date Hierarchy
    3. Click the one that says Date
      1. The data table should change to display something like "Friday, July 25, 2025" instead of all of those extra columns.
        1. While that is pretty, it is not really want we want for this.  An adjustment to the Semantic Model is needed to get it to look the way we really want it.
    4. Choose File from the top left
    5. Choose Save
  4. At the top of the screen, click "Open Data Model"
    1. A new tab opens, related to your Data Model aka Semantic Model
    2. Click the "Viewing" button in the top right
    3. Choose "Editing"
    4. In the Data panel,
      1. Expand your data (click the little > next to "financials"
      2. Click "Date"
    5. In the Properties panel,
      1. Choose "Date time format"
      2. Choose "*3/14/2001 (m/d/yyyy)"
    6. Close this tab (changes save automatically)
  5. Back in your original tab, you may need to reload your window to the see changes.
    1. The date column should display all dates in a format that looks like 7/25/2025
  6. Choose File
  7. Choose Save
We are with this for today.  I know it seems like a lot now, but most of these things will never need touched in this report again.  Power BI will remember everything we did.

Thursday, July 24, 2025

Hours Worked 12-Week Average Report Tool


The Hours Worked 12 Week Average report monitors employee hours across the past 12 calendar weeks. It helps users review weekly hours, calculate each employee’s 12-week average, identify employees whose average hours fall within selected thresholds, and analyze overall workforce-hour trends.

12-Wk Average

The 12-Wk Average page provides employee-level and organization-level analysis of hours worked during the past 12 calendar weeks.

The page allows users to:

  • Review weekly total hours by employee.
  • View each employee’s average hours across the 12-week period.
  • Filter employees by employment type.
  • Filter results using average-hour thresholds, including less than 8, less than 30, less than 36, greater than 30, and greater than 36 hours.
  • Filter by employee, employee status, location, and total hours.
  • Review the overall trend in average hours across the selected period.
  • Use the narrative summary to understand changes in the overall hours trend.


Version Notes

The Version Notes page documents report calculations, business rules, data source changes, enhancement history, and report maintenance activities. It serves as the technical documentation for the report and provides reference information for users who need to understand how the report is built, maintained, and updated.

Model

Depends upon an separate model for Payroll Hours Paid

Friday, July 18, 2025

Power BI Report Data Refresh - Snack 6



Now that we have everything relatively stable, and before we get to far into it, let's take a moment to consider how we might keep this updated.

This can be done easily, if you are getting data from a source that is consistent in format, meaning it looks exactly the same every time but with new numbers.

This can be done with very little effort and without having to go through the previously discussed process every single time.

Let's go over a couple of facts.

  • The data set is in "My Workspace" in the Power BI Service.  
    • It is named "Financial%20Sample," if you are using the same dataset that I am.
  • The data (aka your spreadsheet) is still stored in OneDrive.
    • It is named "Financial Sample.xlsx" if you are using the same file I am.
      • I can't tell you where you stored it though.  You need to know that.

That file can be overwritten new data any time and update your Power BI Report with that new data.

There are a couple of conditions. 

  • The file must be in the exact same structure every time.
  • The file must use the same exact name.
  • The original file must be overwritten with the new file.
Let's do it!

  1. Get your new file, if you have one.
  2. Ensure that file is exactly the same.
  3. Ensure that file has the exact same name as the old one.
  4. Copy that new file into the folder where you stored your original file.
    1. A message will appear indicating "A file with this name already exists so we couldn't upload "Financial Sample.xlsx" Add it as a new version of the existing file or keep them both.
      1. Choose "REPLACE"
  5. Go to the Power BI service online
  6. Go to "My Workspace"
  7. Locate your "Semantic Model" (refer to type to discern the difference)
    1. When you hover over your "Semantic Model," a circular arrow appears.
      1. Hover over that circular arrow and it will say "Refresh"
      2. Click that arrow to refresh your data
        1. To the right of the "Refreshed" date stamp, you will see some dots chasing each other.   
        2. When they stop chasing each other, the report has read your update.
  8. Go look at your report.
    1. If you have had it open, reload the page and your report now has new data.

Of interest:  If your department has a defined Workspace, you can do all this work there, then go into the settings for that Semantic Model and schedule a refresh, so you do not have to do steps 5-7



Sunday, July 13, 2025

Karen drives a Ford

 


Ever wonder what "Karen" drives?  You are looking at it.  Karen loves his Ford F-150 Pick-em Up Truck.  Karen also enjoys cutting people off, break-checking, and then yelling at people for not following their rules of the road, as well as frightening little girls with his own personal brand of crazy and profanity.  If you see Karen, stay away.  He is considered armed with a head full of lunatic and dangerous.  His mother should be proud that he is such a good Christian.

Friday, July 11, 2025

Power BI Snacks Intermission


In case you missed it, we have been walking through how to get yourself going with Power BI Online through little snack size posts over on Viva Engage and Teams.

We learned some terms, grabbed some data, imported it, and created our first simple visual.

There are definitely more exciting things to come!

It seems everyone was out for a super-fabulous holiday weekend, so I thought I might just do a quick recap this week.  Use this opportunity to explore what we have done already, simply catch up, work on your tan, or all of the above.

Below are links to what has been covered so far, to help you in those efforts ... sunscreen not included.

See you for the next round?

As an interesting side note, I only just now discovered Mina Saad over on LinkedIn wrote along similar lines about a year ago.  Super informative posts on the topic and even tinier bites.  That's where I hijacked this week's image.

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Another Fourth of Arkansas

 


It probably comes as no surprise that we again returned to Arkansas for this fourth of July.  It is becoming quite habitual in nature.   The crew of a few grew to a crew of seven on this particular expedition south in the north central area of the state.

The journey offered up a few new intrigues by way of Boliver, Springfield, and the Peel Ferry.  Our ongoing investigation into the location included visits to the usual haunts along the Mossy Bluff and the Sugar Loaf.


The fourth of July exploded all around, fitting with the regular expectations.  Heber Springs stood apart this year, holding its return fire until Saturday the 5th.  That seemed to work well for folks further south, enabling them to stick around in Little Rock for the main event, and arrive the following down for the closer.


The return trip was nothing to write home about but did give up a story idea and some new scenery.  Otherwise, we put our effort into avoiding lake traffic, of which there turned out to be very little.  One can never be too cautious though, especially with boat-trucks unable to maintain their lane.

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Tao Verse 7


By having no claims to life, they cannot be claimed by death.


Popular Variations