For a "by-the-hour project"? You're nuts. Nobody uses a stop watch to bill for hours. The increments are never smaller than 15 minutes, Worhol's range of fame.
I wrote a Task Tracking Tool, and I improve it continually as well. It really is not that difficult. My spreadsheets get top ratings. I am sure the abusers of the group will now cause that to drop, however. In fact, I would bet on it.
I am not the only one and it's practical. For example, there isn't always a computer around where I work and other times they must be turned off for radio silence. I am an analog guy. Press start -> work -> dogs start barking, Fedex truck pulls up -> press stop -> sign for package, Rottweiler hints that he needs to go potty, go out with him, clean up poopoo, come back in, wash hands -> press start -> resume work.
I also bill at 15min granularity. That's got nothing to do with the stop watch though, it is only used to log time where I need it.
Nice. But I am not a believer in spreadsheets for logging, I use a database. My entry sheet is different from yours in that each entry is a line item with several columns. Date, project, client code, invoice number, category, hours, rate, subtotal, brief description of what I did. Category means type of cost, such as work, materials or travel costs. And it's not really a sheet, it is a list view that can have almost infinite scroll length. MS-Works maybe limited to 4000 lines or so but if I'd get there within a tax year I'd have a heart attack ;-)
I also used it to convert hundreds of older .doc files to the version XP uses. Most files can be written to a lot of different formats, where Microsoft can't import files from its own older versions. That is one of the things that makes it harder to use, but I installed it for free, rather than sit there and convert everything to .txt files on an old computer, move them to XP, and restore the formatting, one file at a time. It read an old file, then I saved it in the new format.
Strange, I can read in files I created in the 90's, no problem. Regular MS-Word. All except one PC here run XP now but that didn't change a thing WRT *.doc files. And it shouldn't.
A lot of these were written in works, or Wordpad.
It is more for a physical log for tasks which typically last more than
15 minute segments.The time also gets placed into the accounting system. This is just for the personal record.
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I have long been at the point of having just one or two apps, very infrequently used, that i cannot get to run in wine. Soon though i will abandon them or the providers will make Linux versions.
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That's what you think. Try that with M$word 2007. You will find that they thought differently.
Stopwatch + MS Excel =3D
Worthless without the source code.
[...]
Ok, so it's like what my pencil and the time log sheet in my daytimer does :-)
Time/System makes special insert paper for that job.
For Works there is a converter AFAIK. But sometime in the 90's Works was shipped with regular MS-Word in there so that one thorn in its side went away.
[...]
Yep, ran into that on Friday. pptx format, unreadable. MS offers a free converter to fix their booboo, but it sure was a blunder IMHO.
Unspoken rules in industry:
a. Store everything Office-97 compatible.
b. When new PC comes, immediately set check box "Do not use features past Office-97".
Or just don't buy Office 2007. What for?
There are a lot of converter programs, but they were too expensive. O.O. 3.1 was free, and worked. I don't have a business to pay for things I rarely need.
Regular=20
The entirety of office 2007 has the same disease.
Mine works fine, so what disease is that? Does it make it more difficult for the bent brained know it alls to use?
1) It's what they're teaching in schools today (even in dinky little towns in southern Oregon here), and sooner or later those kids are the ones in charge of the purchases, and Microsoft knows they'll spec what they're used to... hence the reason they give their products to schools for free or close to it. 2) Security fixes?
There actually are some people who use features in the newer versions of Office -- they're just few and far between.
I'm sorry to hear your report than OpenOffice's database is still not that great.
---Joel
There is a reason why it ain't used in this here office. You can still buy regular licenses of older versions. Which sometimes happen to cost more than Office 2007. Guess there's a reason for that, too :-)
So far I haven't encountered that in business. There is the occasional case where someone does use 2007 and sends a file in this new-fangled proprietary format. Upon request they reformat and nothing gets lost. Which sometimes surprises folks.
There are much better open source database programs, although unfortunately many of those are Linux-centric so can't be used in most businesses. I could, inside a virtual engine. Then again MS-Works really suffices and does databasing very nicely. Considering that you can always buy a full license for under $50 that software is a real bargain. My first copy of DOS-Works 1.05 cost me $105 back in 1989 when I first started self-employed. Even that was a bargain because, just like Windows-Works today, it did my complete biz-bookkeeping.
To my surprise many small business owners do not know about this little gem that comes pre-loaded on many PCs. It's listed on the invoice but soon forgotten. When I show them what it can do it is always a real eye-popper.
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