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Simple Excel time log
Mike Renfro | Feb 11 2007
I'm a staff engineer at a public university, and one unpleasant administrative thing I have to do is log release time on various projects. The usual quarterly process was something like (mildly exaggerated for humor):
The attached Excel and OpenOffice sheets are a bit of an improvement on the last few steps. The basic usage would be to enter the project info at the top of the sheet, then fill out dates, starting/ending times, and descriptions into the log table below. The last column will automatically calculate durations, and the sheet header will automatically calculate the date range on your entries. And finally, the sheet header will total up all the durations for the final goal, the answer to "how many hours do you have on this project since (insert date here)?". One good thing with this setup is that I don't have to worry about the processing phase as much. Just run through each information source and dump dates, times, and tasks. Sort them afterwards with the built-in data sort on any spreadsheet program. And I get to look slightly more competent. Comments or suggestions welcomed, as is moving this thread somewhere more suitable if needed. 3 Comments
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Looks very interesting mwr ...Submitted by Laura M. on February 15, 2007 - 12:50am.
Looks very interesting mwr I'll give it a try, if it works for me I'll let you know. I'm interested in it especially since my next-actions and project lists are in Excel now. »
Must have been lost in the vBulletin->Drupal migrationSubmitted by mwr on May 23, 2008 - 5:32am.
I did post it at the time, but it’s off the site now. I’ll see if I can dig it up later today, but since I couldn’t find it immediately, it should be obvious how good my follow-through was on continuously using that sheet. Or if someone who saw this thread at the time and downloaded a copy of the sheet could re-post it somewhere, that’d be good, too. Worst-case, I’ll rework it and post it somewhere more permanent. The sheet wasn’t terribly complicated. Update: ODS and Excel versions uploaded here. »
About mwrBio Mike Renfro is a Research and Development Engineer in the Center for Manufacturing Research at Tennessee Technological University. One part mechanical engineer, one part Unix sysadmin, and ten parts redneck je ne sais quoi. Married and taking orders from two cats in Cookeville, TN. |
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