You are visitor number ????? since 20 June 2009

Go to Howard Kaikow's home page

Copyright © 2009 by Howard Kaikow. All rights reserved.

Date: 20 June 2009

Author: Howard Kaikow <kaikow@standards.com>

Subject: Howard Kaikow's Excel Fix Time Workbook


Download the latest version of the program to create and use Howard Kaikow's Excel Fix Time Workbook

Overview

On 11 May 2009, I switched from using the local telephone company to a cable company for voice telephone. They allow downloading a history of dialed, received and missed calls. It is likely that other cable/VOIP/etc. companies also offer this information for download.

I expected to be able to open a Microsoft Excel workbook, and copy the data into the workbook, then perform simple operations, such as using Excel's SUM function to find out how much time I had spent on the phone, and for particular numbers.

It was disappointing to find that the SUM function produced a value of 0, unless I manually massaged the imported data..

Of course, since I would be downloading more data at least 1-2 times per month, the manual fixing of things would get rather tedious. So being a programmer, I have written an Excel macro to do the deed.

I have decided to allow others to use the macro, with the hope that companies will change the way they export the data, perhaps, eliminating the need for the macro or manual massaging of the data.

Installing the program and DLL

Download the latest version of the program to create and use Howard Kaikow's Excel Fix Time Workbook

Run the HowardKaikowExcelFixTime.exe program. The program will:

Requirements

The DLL and EXE were compiled using Microsoft Visual Basic 6 (with SP 6) and Microsoft Office 2003. The program should work with Microsoft Excel 2003 and 2007. I have intentionally not compiled the program to use Excel 97, Excel 2000 and Excel 2002, as I could not justify the time to do so and to test such options.

To use the DLL and CreateWorkbookFixTime.exe, please note the following requirements:

How to use the workbook and Fix Time macro

The workbook is created with the code necessary to run the macro and a reference to the DLL. In addition, there is code that automatically creates the toolbar each time you open the workbook and deletes the toolbar each time you close the workbook.

The macro is used by selecting the troublesome cells in the workbook, then clicking on the Fix Time button on the toolbar. In Excel 2003, the toolbar should default to being visible, if not make the toolbar visible. In Excel 2007, one has to click on the Addins menu to display the toolbar.

To give you an idea of how to actually use the workbook, the following is a description of what I have done since 11 May 2009: