I have been looking for an easy way to track my time at work for a while now, but my desire to find the right tool recently became more important with my promotion at work to eBook Development supervisor. I have been able to keep track of my time spent on individual projects in the past, but I now have more duties and I want to be able to see where my time is going.

So, I started looking around the Internet last week for a decent solution to my problem. Unfortunately, none of the free timers and trackers I found are easy to use. Most of them require that you fill in tasks manually in an interface before you can start a timer to track yourself.

A few weeks ago, Gina at Lifehacker posted a small VB script called QuickLogger that garnered a lot of attention. The script opens an input box when it is run, you type in your current task, and it adds that to a text document. That's cool, and it is certainly closer to what I was looking for, but I am not hot on tracking time in a text document.

Then, last Friday, Gina posted another VB script called xlsQuickLogger that adds your work entries to an Excel spreadsheet. I was much more interested in this one, but it was not really robust enough, and the spreadsheet was not formatted at all. So, over the last few days I have tweaked it and added some functionality and formatting, which is no small feat, considering I don't know VB script. My programming is limited to Perl and WordBASIC (the precursor to VBA found in Word 95, but looking nothing like VBA in form), but Google is a decent teacher.

xlsQuickLoggerPlus will:

1. Create a new workbook if the one specified in the file does not already exist
2. Format new workbooks with a title and set column widths
3. Format new days as separate sections with a date header
4. Place a timestamp in column A, user text in column B, and time difference in column C.

This upgrade to xlsQuickLogger is also released under the GPL, so feel free to mess with it some more if you like.

Download xlsQuickLoggerPlus.vbs

Labels: Technology