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When reporting, does anybody ever find the course duration in seconds useful?

Hi there, 

Some of you may have already seen my multiple questions today, so apologies for raising another one (I am on a roll!).

I am just starting to learn about working with reports and I have discovered that the Course Duration field reports back in seconds (rather than minutes or hours).  Now I can understand how hours might be a challenge to read with decimals and the combination of hours and minutes might be difficult to display, but surely minutes would be much more useful to everyone?

Interested to know - does anyone have a requirement for any durations or reporting to be shown in seconds rather than minutes (or the nearest minute)?

Cheers

Sean

10 replies

lrnlab
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Userlevel 7
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Not really..especially not in seconds as you need to add some formulas to your reports to make it make sense. It’s more of annual review than something you look at everyday.

Bfarkas
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Userlevel 7
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The seconds come in handy for micro learnings, and as you mentioned it can get confusing to add fractions to these types of fields. While he’s you need to add formulas, I try to emphasize system reports are best thought of as raw data, not completed items. There’s a lot of simple ways to build on top of them so you do not need to add formulas continuously, just replace the raw file. 

Sean
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Userlevel 4

Thanks @lrnlab and @bfarkas for your kind responses. 

It’s a good way to look at the reports as ‘raw data’, I guess I was hopeful that we’d be able to get something easy and pretty (!!) each month to present to our management team without having to spend too long in making them look beautiful. 😆

Cheers

Sean

Bfarkas
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Userlevel 7
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I am working on a writeup on how I do this, the effort once you build the first is seconds, and worth it. Requires no special tools besides excel (although if you have other tools you can) this is why I try to emphasize the approach. Stay tuned!

Sean
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Userlevel 4

Thanks @Bfarkas, that sounds really great!  Am looking forward to checking back again soon :-)

S
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Userlevel 4
Badge +3

Hi all, resurfacing this conversation. Does anyone know a way so course duration on a report reports in minutes instead of seconds? We can always change it in excel afterwards, but would be better to report in minutes.

L
Userlevel 1
Badge

Hi all, this is also an issue for us. If anyone has any advice, that would be appreciated!

 

@Sean did you ever get any sort of resolution on this?

@Bfarkas, did you ever manage to build something in Excel that got around this issue? Would be very interested to hear! 

Please post a link in this thread if you have submitted a Request on the community that we can all upvote.

Bfarkas
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Userlevel 7
Badge +4

Hi @Lucy , yeah the writeup I referenced was not for this precise scenario, but for the general approach to modifying reports in excel. You can find tha there:

What I do for things like this is set the Docebo report as the data source, and then build the actual report in excel based on it, in this case convert the time for example (dividing the time in the Docebo column by 60 for instance) and pivot tables and any other calculations. Once you have it configured, you simply replace the Docebo report file each time, and your new report updates using the new data, instead of having to apply the same calculations. Its a bit of a mind shift away from treating an export as a finished product, rather treating the export as a data source.

admin_mhshomes
Rank

WHY they’ve decided to report it in seconds, I do not know.  It’s very annoying.  I appreciate that you can export the data into Excel and then apply formulae to get what you want out of it, but that’s not helpful when you want to use the report scheduling function.

 

I’m looking for a way to change the duration to hours if anyone has a trick for this?

A
Rank

No. I never look at it because I don’t have the time to convert it.

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