Microsoft has recently made it easy to track attendance in a Teams meeting.  (No more trying to do screen captures as people come and go!)   Now you can have a record of when someone has joined or dropped off during a meeting – even if they do so several times.  This new capability is good if your organization requires you to take a general attendance at a meeting or training session.  It’s also helpful if you want to look back at any time in the future to remind yourself who attended.

The process is actually very easy, but please note that a couple of things must be true for this to work:

• You have to be the meeting organizer, and
• Your Admin has to have enabled attendance reports. (The instructions for admins are found here: Meeting policy settings – Meeting attendance report.)

Steps to track attendance

So, if you are the meeting organizer and your admin has you set up with this ability, follow these steps to track attendance:

1)  Join or start the meeting as you normally would.

2)  Click into the Participant view (the people icon in the bottom toolbar) and a “People” sidebar will appear on the right. Here you can see the list of those invited to the meeting, and whether or not they’ve joined yet.  As each person joins, their name will move from the “Others invited” section up to the “Currently in the meeting” section, with a red dot next to their name.   If you have attended meetings before, this should already be familiar to you.

3)  As an organizer, however, you have another set of tools available to you that is not visible to the other attendees. While in the “People” sidebar, you will see a download arrow in the upper right.   Hover over it and you will notice it says “download attendance list”.   Click on it and Teams will do just that: download an attendance list file.

4)  Open up your File Explorer and find the file in Downloads.  It will be in the form of a .csv spreadsheet, which you can open in Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheet software.    Open that file and you can see the list of attendees who joined the meeting, left the meeting, and a time stamp for those activities:

Sample Teams meeting attendance file

Keep in mind that you need to download the attendance list while the meeting is still in progress.  It seems to makes sense to do so toward the very end of the meeting, so you can capture all of the comings and goings that occurred from the beginning to (almost) the end.