Working Time Calendar
Simple time tracking with iCal and AppleScript ()
There are many many applications that help you to track your working time. Nearly all of them act as like a stop-watch. But why not inscribe your working hours intuitively into a classical calendar sheet? You already have Apple iCal on every Mac with OS X. With a little Apple-Script you can coerce iCal to be a time tracker! So download the ">2 scripts and some templates and read this article.
It is recommendable to have one calendar for each job. There you put (preferably consistently) your working time with a short summary (may be the kind of work) and a comment (may be what you have done). It is really simple and gives you an perfect overview of the day, week or month.
Write time to the calendar´s description
This script for Apple iCal writes the working-time into the calendars description.
It summarizes the time of all events in a chosen calendar and writes the result at the end of it´s description. So you don´t have to leave Apple iCal to see your working-time. Simple.
The time is shown in decimal values. All-day-events will be set to zero, because otherwise they cause 24 hours. Therefore if you really have an event starting at 00:00:00 with duration of 24 hours it will zero hours, too. But you will see a notice in the description, how many all-day events have been ignored.
A date behind the working-time reminds you, when the script was started the last time. The description can be edited, maybe to delete previous working-times written by this script. Keep in mind, that this script does n´t work, if the text-cursor is placed in the description.
iCal Calendar Report
Click the script and a few seconds later you can see your working hours from iCal summarized in a spreadsheet. The script iCal-calendar-report collects all events of a chosen calendar with:
start-date, start-time and end-time, the duration of the event (in decimal hours), to summarize elapsed time in your spreadsheet or database
the calendars name, summary and finally the description. It provides detailed info about your work for you and probably your customers
a date-stamp of the current day, to find double entries, if you repeatedly run the script with the same calendar
Double-click the script-icon and you will be asked for the calendar you want to report. A tab-separated list with all the according events will be copied to the clipboard as plain text (e.g. good for AppleWorks 6). In the end of the script a favorite application can be activated (you should change this with script-editor initially for your needs). Date and time is generated in your systems standard.
Report into AppleWorks, Excel, Tables, a Database, ...
You can paste the report into one of the simple templates, which are included with this script. It will summarize the elapsed time at a glance. Or use it in a database or wherever you want. You should sort the dates immediately, unfortunately the events sequence is disordered. Filled up calendars may take some time to process, so just be patient - it works!
Pasted into an AppleWorks 6 table date and time is automatically identified, in Apple Numbers and Excel currently only as text (german versions at all). iCal-descriptions with very long text may not fit into a table cell and returns are replaced, because otherwise the result would be unwanted table-rows.
Update
The new Version iCal-calendar-report-c.scpt now generates Excel-friendly short dates, which really will be recognized as a date. I tested it with iCal and Tiger (german) and Excel X 2001 (english). ()
Download
Download: 3 scripts and some spreadsheet templates
Links
A similar script written by Kim Hunter: Calculate your work hours