About

QuickLogger is a free, Open Source time and task tracking program. It is coded in VBscript wrapped in an HTML Application (HTA), and it saves task logs in a variety of file formats. Here is the story of how QuickLogger was born.

QuickLogger.vbs

On July 26th, 2006, Gina Trapani posted a Geek To Live feature article on Lifehacker.com titled “Quick-log Your Work Day“. That article has been viewed over 27,000 times and has generated a long list of comments. The focus of the article was a small VBScript that Gina had created, based on code from someone named Joshua Fitzgerald, which allowed users to log tasks throughout the day in a text file. The script, called QuickLogger.vbs, was very basic, but was definitely a beneficial little tool.

Other Variations

Some other people individually adjusted the original text file based QuickLogger script to do useful things. Kirk Friggstad added ISO-style timestamps, automatic file rotation, and some minor fixes in a version he called QuickLogger Plus. L. S. Russell created a version that saved the tasks to a basic HTML file, which could then be loaded onto an active desktop. Arvind created another little utility based on the same concept called Life Logger, which runs in the system tray and saves tasks to a plain text file.

xlsQuickLogger.vbs

One week later, Gina posted a new Geek To Live article with a new script. This script, titled xlsQuickLogger.vbs, does essentially the same thing as the earlier variety, but instead of saving the task list to a text file, the tasks are saved to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

xlsQuickLoggerPlus.vbs

When I saw that post and tried out the script, I decided I liked the idea of tracking my time in Excel. The biggest benefit of that over a text file is the automatic calculation of time spent on a project, not just a timestamp for each task. What I didn’t like about xlsQuickLogger was that it did not format the Excel spreadsheet when it was created, which was a slight annoyance.

I decided to add some formatting functionality to xlsQuickLogger so that my annoyances would not keep me from actually using it. That proved to be a decent-sized project, since I do not know how to program in VBScript, but in the end, xlsQuickLoggerPlus was born. The Excel file was given headings for each day, specific column widths, and some other little features. Despite these great additions, I stopped using the tool after about a week or two of frustration at bugs and missing features that would, I thought, just take too long to fix or add.

The Birth of QuickLogger 2.0

One year after the original QuickLogger was released I found myself in need of a good time tracking program for myself and my co-workers. I went back and started looking at the options again, and found that my little xlsQuickLoggerPlus was still the best option available. Remembering the issues I had had with the script before and the features that I really wished it included, I decided to re-work it as much as necessary this time to make it actually work well.

Of course, as usually happens when you start on a project like this, I found out quickly that it was not going to be an easy one. The first issue was that I have never studied VBScript programming. While I learned WordBASIC many years ago and I use Perl on a regular basis for work, my only exposure to VBScript was the time I had spent the year before making changes to Gina’s script, and most of that code was the result of many hours of searching Google. I also found out early on that VBScript only supports two user interfaces: an InputBox and a Message Box. The solution I saw suggested numerous times online was to put the VSBScript in an HTML Application file, called an HTA. After moving to that format, I found that I could implement a lot of the great features I really wanted to add. After over 50 hours of researching, programming, and bug hunting, the application was finally ready for prime time.

Conclusion

That’s the gist of it! QuickLogger includes some of the most important features of the other individually-developed versions, as well as some great feature enhancements that make it the easiest-to-use free time tracker available.