Microsoft Word or Excel “Editing Time” — is Qlockwork an Alternative?
If you want to automatically track how much time you spent writing a particular Word document one option is Word’s “Editing Time” property. In this post, I’ll demonstrate that Qlockwork is a more accurate alternative.
For Excel, the “Editing Time” property is present but empty —again, Qlockwork is a good option.
Total Editing Time in Microsoft Word
To see Word’s “Editing time” property for any document go to the File menu. You’ll see the “Total Editing Time” field on the right (see above).
The “Editing Time” field reflects the total time the document has been open on your desktop, irrespective of whether it was actively in the foreground and you were typing into it or reading it, or it was in the background. The field can be manually extracted from the File menu using cut and paste. The “Editing Time” field therefore overstates the time you actually spent on the document unless you remember to close the file every time you stop working on it.
Qlockwork, on the other hand, tracks the time you were actively working on the document (typing in or reading it). You can see exactly how much time you spent and when you spent it. You can see the data in your Outlook calendar, in email reports and also in a .csv spreadsheet export. No cut ’n’ paste is required.
So, I conducted an experiment.
- I spent ~5 minutes typing into my Word document “Test Doc”, then went for a cup of tea (this is Britain).
- Qlockwork correctly tracked me as having spent 5 minutes in “Test Doc”.
- Word’s Editing Time, however, overstated this as 49 minutes because it included my well-earned tea break in the time I spent editing the document.
Qlockwork demonstrably provided more accurate data, more context (exactly when I worked on the document) and exported the data in a more usable form (a calendar interface, email report & Excel report).
Total Editing Time in Microsoft Excel
Unfortunately, the situation in Excel is even worse. Although a “Total Editing Time” property exists for Excel (see the “Advanced Properties”, “Statistics” tab above) if never appears to be filled out.
Qlockwork however, tracks all the time you have any Excel spreadsheet open and you are actively using it.
If you’d like to try Qlockwork as an alternative to Word or Excel Editing Time we have a free 10 day trial , which you can download and run without any help. However, we’re always extremely happy to chat about the product if you do want help, by email (info@workingprogram.com), twitter @qlockwork or Facebook. Just drop us a line!
