Overview

DayBook is a visual, drag-and-drop time-tracking system designed to help project-

oriented workers quickly and accurately track — and report — their work time. It
operates as a local browser-based application using Microsoft's Internet Explorer
(IE) version 5.5 or greater (version 6.0 is recommended).

DayBook has two primary visual components:

Project Tree: A hierarchical list of available projects and tasks.

Activity Grid: A scrolling 7-day, 24-hour grid that contains time entries

Time entries are created by selecting a DayBook User Interface

task from the Project Tree (an expandable
"treeview" similar to the left pane of
Windows Explorer) and dragging the
entry to the Activity Grid. The entry is
positioned on the grid at the appropriate
day and starting time, and then can be
resized to reflect the amount of time spent
on the task. Comments specific to work
that was done can be added by double-
clicking on the entry. Entries can be Create time entries by dragging a task.
duplicated using the standard copy-and-
paste procedure. Users can configure the time increment used to resize time entries
(6, 10, 15, 30 or 60 minutes) as well as the default duration of time entries dragged
to the grid.

The Activity Grid defaults to display the current week, but the grid's perpetual
week-selector allows users to move to any desired week in the past or future. The
grid scrolls vertically to display all 24 hours of each day. Users can specify the time
that their typical workday begins and the grid will automatically be positioned at
that time when the application is launched or when the user moves between weeks.
Another configurable option allows users to decide the order in which days of the
week appear in the grid.

To assist in tracking time, the Activity Grid includes an hours total for each
displayed day. Printable customized reports can be created at any time.

The Project Tree includes two predefined folders: "Projects", where actual projects
and tasks reside, and "My Work", for shortcuts to frequently used tasks and projects.
"My Work" is particularly convenient when there are a large number of items in the
"Projects" folder but only a relative few are currently in use.

Projects, tasks and organizational folders are created and modified using context-
sensitive (right-click) menus within the Project Tree. Simple projects can be defined
as a single task. Projects with a handful of tasks can have the tasks organized within
a project folder. At the extreme, a project can have many tasks subdivided in
organizational folders — all within a project folder. Project Tree items can be
moved, reordered, renamed, modified or deleted using the context menus.

DayBook is entirely self-contained — it does not require or use an Internet

connection. All time entries, projects, tasks and user options are stored locally. By
default (and exclusively in the Evaluation version), data is stored in a special
restricted "user data" area accessible to Internet Explorer (the browser does not
allow access to other areas of the user's disk file system). This approach limits the
amount of data that can be stored.

Alternately (with the registered version of DayBook), users can allow DayBook to
have access to the local (or network) disk file system so that the data can be stored
in ordinary text files (in XML format). This change can only be implemented by a
manual change to the primary DayBook HTML page. With this change, IE will
alert the user each time the DayBook application is started, unless the user modifies
the security settings for offline browser use. This does not affect online (web)
security settings. DayBook does not view or write any disk information outside the
Data subfolder that is part of the DayBook installation.