I was asked to report on the time I was spending on different tasks each day. As quick as a flash, I was reminded of Dick’s Excel tool for doing this.

Not too shabby for sure, but these days I’m not always in Excel, and although I could extend Dick’s code, it doesn’t do everything out of the box. So I took a look around, I didn’t look very far to be fair, but I quickly found Rachota. It’s a light weight Java app, its not too bad, but I found it slightly awkward to use. For example to change the tasks you have to jump around the dialog a bit. The dialogs a little ugly, and there’s not much in the way of reporting. Overall a step up from Dicks addin, but still not something I could use meaningfully.

My next, and I’m happy to say final, stop was the mighty; Grindstone.  Firstly a bonus point for the name. It’s a .Net app (looking at the grid control 2+). Itlooks nice and is well layout -not perfect mind. I would have liked to see the bottom controls at the top or in the middle of the dialog – better still, if I could place them where I wanted, but no big deal.

At least you can work down the dialog logically. Reporting is available out of the app, it will fill out a grid control which, inexplicably, you can’t copy out of, but you can export to XML. It also has the ability to calculate invoices, based on a rate table, but I have not used this myself.

Over all a lovely little application!