Blank fields in PBI reports as number of employees and UPNs do not match?

[Nls_prnt]

Dear community, 

When I create standard, out-of-the-box PBI reports (Meeting Effectiveness, Employee Wellbeing, etc.), there are additional fields/values added to my attributes which appear as blank fields. In other words when I view my reports by e.g. "organization" (Finance, Human Resources, ...), an extra field without a name appears in addition to the ones specified in my org. data. 

I assume this happens because the number of employees (i.e. the number of rows in my org. data file) and the number of UPNs that Viva Insights looks at do not match (more UPNs than employees because of shared/non-personal/company-wide email accounts, shared workstations, etc.).

The workaround I found was to create a filter when running a query. Instead of filtering/excluding any group of employees, I include all the ones I can choose for a particular group. Example: I filter by organization, and choose all available fields (Finance, Human Resources, ...). I guess this way only UPNs that belong to a certain individual within the organization are being looked at.

In my view this adds unnecessary complexity and I wanted to ask if there is a "smoother", more straightforward way to solve this. Maybe I am just not finding that little box I need to tick...

Thanks for your help,

Nils

[Dazza · Accepted solution]

Hi @Nls_prnt, 

I also found this when performing custom analysis, and while not much different from what you're doing already, thought I'd share my solution: 

1. Clean the HR data file: I did a thorough clean of the file, ensuring no duplication, empty values etc. before each upload. 

2. When creating the query, ensured that the "Active only" option was ticked

3. Once the data was pulled into Power BI, removed all blanks from the Organization field in Power Query editor. 

Not sure if that will help - but I found that point 3 made working with the data much quicker and cleaner. 

Keep well!

[Nls_prnt]

Hi @Dazza , 

Thanks for your reply! 

1. Done

2. Done

3. Will try!

As I mentioned above, I think the problem appears because there are more UPNs in the VI metadata than there are employees in the HR data file as some UPNs are not directly connected to a single individual (shared accounts, company-wide email addresses, etc.). Cleaning the HR data and checking the "Active only" option doesn't really do the job as those (shared) accounts are active and do not appear in the HR data file. 

A button or a tick box that says "Only include information from Org. Data file" or "Exclude data that is not part of Org. Data" would make my life a lot easier. 

Anyways thanks a lot for your help and keep well! 🙂