1.  You pick a project.
2.  You press a button whenever you’re working on the project.
3.  You’re given the option of noting what you’re working on.
4.  You press the button when you’re done with that task.
5.  The time per project/task is automatically calculated, and the data is sortable.

It’s possible there’s a high-end (read: expensive) solution to offer such a service, but there’s also a reasonable alternative: any computer with Excel or access to Google Docs.

To follow along with this #hack, you should download the Excel file here.

Once you’ve downloaded and opened the spreadsheet, you should be looking at something like this:

The spreadsheet itself is extremely straight-forward.  Remember that start and stop button I imagined?  We can substitute that by pressing [Control] + [Shift] + ;

The above key combination will insert the time into the cell you have highlighted.  So if you’re doing one task (like researching case law) for one client, you insert the time into the cell where you begin, and you do it once more when you’re finished.

- BEGIN MATH ALERT –

The automation comes from the equation I’ve worked into the TOTAL sheet.  You should probably understand how it works in case you need to alter the table to suit your own purposes.  What we really want to do is figure out how much time elapsed between your inserting the time, right?  So assuming you do that in the correct cells, what we really want to do is subtract the beginning time from the ending time, and that should give the total.  So the excel equation in it’s simplest form should look like this:

=D2-C2

The only problem with that is that it won’t account for time done on the same project in the other begin/end columns.  To fix that, we need to add those up as well, so the equation becomes:

=((D2-C2)+(F2-E2)+(H2-G2)+(J2-I2))

- END MATH SECTION -

Don’t worry about having to input that equation more than once, either.  If you select the cell containing the equation as indicated by the circle in the diagram, then click on the square in the bottom right-hand corner and drag down, the equation will insert itself into the cells while editing itself to match the new rows (projects).

I’ll be interested to see if people are able to use this method to suit their needs, and I’d love to hear how you adapt the basic concept to make it more applicable to your work.  As always, if you have any questions or problems, just post in the comments and I’ll try to help out.

(Note: this process is exactly the same, including the equations, on Google Apps)

I’ll answer for you.  Yes.  Yes, it is annoying.

So here’s how to fix that:

Step 1: Open Word.  Click on the (1) Windows button on the top left-hand corner, and click on (2) Word Options.

Step 2: Click on the (3) Advanced tab.  Scroll down to the “Cut, copy, and paste” section, and change “Pasting from other programs” to (4) “Keep Text Only.”

Simple as that.  Now whenever you paste into a document from the web or a PDF (or anything else, for that matter) it should just paste in the text without the rich text formatting.

No more continuously fixing your formatting!

It’s sort of a hack, because the AutoCorrect feature is primarily intended to catch misspellings and automatically correct them, but why not use it to your advantage?  It’s fast because you don’t have to run any external software, and it’s easy to set up.

Note: This tutorial was prepared using Word 2007.

Step 1: Open word.  (1) Click on the stupid Windows button on the top left-hand corner, and (2) click on Word Options.

Step 2: Select the (3) Proofing tab, then click on (4) AutoCorrect Options…

Step 3:  Type the shorthand version of the word you want to add to box (5) and the longhand version in box (6).  Click Add.  Repeat as necessary.

Now for some hints.  Don’t use a shorthand version of words in your native language.  For instance: test could be short for testator, but you probably don’t want to replace test with testator all the time.  For cases like that, I usually use an underscore ( _ ) as a prefix.  So test would be _test.  It’s quick, and quicker than writing testator.  In the case of symbols, this can save a lot of time.  I set _s to replace with the section symbol.

When you start adding symbols and replacing entire phrases with acronyms, this can be a serious time-saver.

Do you all have any other time-saving Word tips?