Free time sheet workflow with Google Sheets & Calendar

From the last post More free tools for productivity where the first item looks at an alternative to using the Google Sheets Timesheet free Plugin which summed project times and did not show daily times per projects I found a convoluted process where I exported the Google Calendar to a zipped .ical file and then converted it into a .csv file with an online tool. Not an elegant process, also in a single direction, from Calendar to Sheets.

After exploring some Google Sheets addons I came across two that solve the issue quite elegantly.

1. Calendar Event Importer (free)

is the first one. You can choose your calendar and also the date range that you wish to import ( I commented on not being able to do that in the last post with that process).

This will import the data nicely, in one process, from Calendar to Sheets.

The second one is

2. Sheets2 GCal (free)

This one can create calendar events in Sheets and then push them into the calendar. This is handy as I sometimes end up noting project times down manually and need to upload them all at once.

I dislike doing this process in a calendar environment as you generally have to do one event at a time. With the Spreadsheet you can just copy/paste lines and edit quickly.

This does need a template setup, it can be quite minimal. One thing I like with this addon is it gives you a link to a template that you can use and adjust.

So these two addons meet my needs. I have calendar on my mobile phone, integrated with my Thunderbird Calendar on my laptop  and can access it online from client offices if I’m working on their PC.

I also have access to Google Sheets online form remote PC’s too. So I can manage the process with these add-ons anywhere.

As this is just a link between 2 online apps it is a lot smoother than the other processes I’ve looked at so far.

You can also tailor it to suit your needs as you can add extra information in the description and also use symbols (hash tag # and say *, $ & etc) as references to different clients for quick filtering if you are working with a few clients or different projects.

Another integration, of sorts?? is

Copy/ Share between Google Keep & Google Docs – Sync ONLY WITH GSuite  paid account

There is no connectivity between the two, it is just a copy/paste, so if you change one there is no synchronization with the other, but a convenient way to share information.  It is supposed to be synchronized though, as per this article How to integrate Google Keep with Google Docs. Further research is its for paid account.

With free account-

There is a sharing process where you can drag a Keep note across to Google Docs (or slides) and you can also cut/paste a note from Google Docs to Keep. You can cut/paste between sheets/keep too, but inelegantly.

If you do paste a list from Docs to a NEW Keep Note then you are given the option of opening it in Keep and there you can add Tick Boxes /colour etc to the note.

Although this is not full integration it is handy for getting ideas across into other docs/sheets. Maybe it’ll come to the free account sometime.