Aptem offers an extensive range of reporting options to provide you with valuable insights and analytics into your delivery. This webinar aimed to providing a better understanding of Aptem's reporting function.

During this session, Aptem's Implementation Consultants took attendees through Generic Reports, Power BI reports, OData, and how to connect Excel to OData.

The session covered:

• Each of the reporting functions in Aptem
• How to connect to your OData stream
• Working with Aptem's APIs
• Q&A

Note: The webinar video below has two demos, around 15:20 onwards and around 26:30 onwards. These demo snippets have also been separately uploaded further below for your reference. See Demo 1: Importing OData into Excel and Demo 2: Importing OData into PowerPoint.

Demo 1: Importing OData into Excel

Demo 2: Importing OData into PowerPoint

Q and A transcript

The following is a transcript of the questions asked during the webinar, along with the answers. For any further information, do contact your Implementation Consultant, Customer Success Manager or Aptem Support.

When you are merging the tables in Excel, does it matter which one you start with?

It doesn't matter which one you start with, as long as when you are identifying the joining, you select the correct IDs. The one that you start with is the one that will appear first in your column selection by default. So, if you start with the learning plan components table, the learning plan components columns appear first on the left-hand side. However, if you do it the opposite way around (start with the user's table), the user fields appear first on the left-hand side. Please also refer to the relationship diagram that sits in the data dictionary, which is where the user's table is central to all the other tables. But it does highlight for you what you can and cannot link.

When importing OData to Excel, do I need to do it every time when working in Excel? So, for example, if I have a user table Excel spreadsheet already connected to our OData, two weeks later if I re-open it, will it still pull our new data from OData?

So the way Excel will work in this scenario is when you go back in and re-open Excel, you will have an option in the top left to refresh your data. You would need to click on refresh to get the most up-to-date, and essentially your live data pulling through from Aptem before you work with that data.

Are there any easier ways to report in Excel using OData without the use of queries or SQL coding?

Excel is much more query-based than Power BI. In James' demonstration, where he extracted to Power BI, there are much more user-friendly options. However, we are limited by the functionality that exists within Excel and Power BI. And obviously, we don't control those platforms, they're produced by Microsoft.

Can you merge more than once, for example, merging a table to an already merged table?

Yes, absolutely. The same process would apply, you would use a merged table, and create a join to a new table that you wanted to extract. For example, you could have a users table, linked to the Learning Plan components table, linked to the ILR Aims table.

I've noticed that when accessing the query, it shows that it has not been refreshed for a number of days. Should this not be completed automatically?

So, you do have to click the 'Refresh' button if you want your data to refresh to show the latest data in Aptem.

Slide Deck

The Slide deck pdf is attached here: