Saturday, January 28, 2012

Solution: Displaying KTimeTracker results chronologically

KTimeTracker is very cool. It automatically adds events to an .ics file for events on the computer.

But it has no way to display the record in a chronological fashion.

The solution is a bit of a hack, but after several hours of googling about it seems to be the only way:

1. Load the .ics file as a new calendar in Thunderbird's Lightning calendar application (Sunbird is defunct, Evolution does not offer the conversion).
   File > Open > Calendar File > (Navigate to the .ics file)
  
   This will display most of the events as "Tasks" but not to worry, we are just using the file conversion feature of Lightning.
  
2. Export it as a .csv file:
       Right click on the calendar file in the left panel (e.g. chronology), select Export Calendar,
       select Outlook Comma Separated Values (.csv) as the output file format,
       and choose the filename (which in this case defaults to chronology)
       (Delete the calendar in Lightning: right click and choose Delete...)
   
4. Open the exportedfilename.csv in Excel or OpenOffice Calc. This will trigger the text-to-columns editor. Ensure you select Separated by: Commas and especially, Detect special numbers or else the times will be imported as text fields with a text delimiter I cannot figure out how to delete.
  
5.  Format the date and time columns as desired. I prefer 24 hour formats, which at a touch confirms that the times have been properly imported.
  
6. Sort the result as you wish.

Easy when you know how...
As I said, this is a hack. It only gives the result at a snapshot of time. I wish KTimeTracker would just offer a chronological sort presentation, which would show ongoing results. But it doesn't.

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