Microsoft’s Calendar Analytics app shows you where your time is spent
For those of you trying to figure out where all your time goes and why you are not more productive, Microsoft has an application for you called Calendar Analytics. The application is being given away free today in honor of Administrative Professional’s day.
According to Microsoft, the application works with PowerPivot, Exchange and Excel to pull together meeting and other information. The information is presented on a “Dashboard” for easy analysis and modification of time usage. Calendar Analytics helps organizations and individuals to see where they are spending their time to gauge if their time is being spent most efficiently and effectively.
Along with the application, there is a video from Bruno Aziza and BusinessIntelligence.tv. It basically walks you through the program. The program will show you how you spend your time in both pie charts and bar graphs. You can see how you spend each month, day, time of day or hour. You can see how much time you are spending on work and personal projects, undesignated time, business development and staff development.
You can also look at how much time you are spending with clients, co-workers, supervisors, and supervisees. Also available are graphs that show how much time you spent in each meeting and who organized those meetings. You have a snapshot of where your priorities have been, giving you the ability to readjust where and how you spend your time.
In order to use this program you must use Microsoft’s Exchange for calendaring and must have PowerPivot in order to retrieve the information for the program. Once all of the information is retrieved you pull it Calendar Analytics within Excel. You must be using Excel 2010 and the 64 bit version is preferred.
The program has some spiffy bells and whistles and creates pretty graphs and pie charts but unless your company or firm is large enough to be using Microsoft Exchange, you won’t be able to get much out of this program. Organizations that only use Outlook won’t find this tool helpful. The good news is that it is a free download at least for today and works with PivotPoint that is also free.
Of course, if you work for a large enough company that could actually use this tool, you will have to go through your IT personnel that is after pitching the program to the decision makers. Won’t those meetings be fun to graph.
Above picture from Microsoft: Tom Casey, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Business Platform Division, and Executive Assistant Melissa Krohn use the new Calendar Analytics application to review and adjust how Casey spends his time.
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