OptiLearn

Every report you build or open in OptiLearn can be downloaded as a file. The Export button lives on the report viewer at /analytics/reports/[id] and supports three formats out of the box.

How to export

Open any saved report.
Click the Export dropdown in the top-right of the viewer.
Choose CSV, Excel (XLSX), or PDF.
The file downloads to your browser's default location with a name like Weekly_enrollment_digest_2026-04-13.xlsx.

The export uses the same data you see on screen. If your role only sees your own courses, the exported file will contain only your courses. Sharing a saved report with another user does not let them export data they couldn't otherwise see — exports run through the same scope guard as the live view.

Format reference

CSV

UTF-8 with BOM (Excel-friendly on Windows)
CRLF line endings, RFC 4180 quoting
Numbers stay numeric — no thousands separators that would confuse parsers
Best for: piping into another tool, spreadsheets, scripts

Excel (XLSX)

Single sheet named after the report
Frozen header row
Auto-sized columns (capped at 60 chars to keep the file sane)
Numeric-looking cells written as numbers, not strings — formulas and SUM() work immediately
Best for: analysts, ad-hoc pivoting, sharing with non-technical staff

PDF

Landscape A4
Title block with report name, description, and generation timestamp
Striped table with page numbers in the footer
Table-only in v1 — chart rendering lands in v1.1
Best for: emailing summaries, printing, archiving

What the file contains

For rows-mode reports (no grouping or aggregation), the file has one column per field you selected, in the order you selected them, plus the row id.

For buckets-mode reports (grouped or aggregated), the first column is the group key (e.g. 2026-04-13 for a daily time grouping, or PUBLISHED for a status grouping), and the remaining columns are the aggregation series.

Either way, the file mirrors what you see in the viewer's table view. If your report renders as a chart, the export still produces a tabular projection of the same data.

Row limits

Exports cap at 10,000 rows in v1 — the same hard limit the executor enforces for live runs. If your report would return more rows, the file is truncated and the metadata header (in PDF) or the last row (in CSV/XLSX) reflects this.

If you regularly need exports beyond 10k rows, file a feature request — the next phase of the engine adds a queued async export path that streams to object storage.

Audit trail

Every export writes a row to LMSAuditLog with:

The action (report.export)
The format (csv, xlsx, pdf)
The row count and file size
Who exported and when
Their IP address and user agent

Institution admins will get an audit log viewer in a future release. For now, exports are queryable via direct DB access.

Tips

Pick CSV for big numbers. A 10k-row CSV is roughly 1MB; the equivalent XLSX is closer to 2MB; a PDF can grow to 4MB. CSV is the fastest both to generate and to download.
Pick PDF for sharing with non-technical stakeholders. It's the only format that includes the report name, description, and a footer — everything else is "just data."
Pick XLSX for downstream analysis. Numbers stay numeric, so SUM() works immediately and pivot tables behave.
Use a Schedule for recurring exports. If you find yourself exporting the same report every Monday, set up a scheduled delivery instead — it will email you the file on cadence.

Exporting Reports