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Timely lets you create beautiful Shared Reports for clients and colleagues, as well as simply documenting Timely data for your own records. So it makes sense they can also be exported in Excel, PDF and CSV formats to suit different needs. Here's how to go about exporting! 📁
Create a Report
From the Reports page, create a custom report and select your desired filters from the options along the top. Once you've set your preferences and saved your report, click the “Export” option in the top right hand corner.
Export your Report
Once you click the "Export" button, you'll see that there are three export formats available within Timely:
.csv
.xls
.pdf
Each of these can serve or be used for different purposes depending on the type of work you do or the type of company you’re a part of. Each of these options also have a slightly different layout and available data columns that can be included.
CSV
Your .csv exports can be downloaded an opened in tools like Excel or Google Sheets with the raw data from the report you’re exporting. These are especially handy if you want to pipe your data into other tools to visualize your information. Likewise, if you already have templates built in Excel or Google Sheets, you can reference the cells, rows or columns to work with formulas you’ve already written to help you incorporate and present Timely data in a way that helps your team.
Excel
Downloading reports as .xls files can be great if you’re looking to slice and dice data in Excel via pivot tables and get going with the information right away. Simply having the numbers isn’t enough, so being able to break them down further with Excel’s extended suite of tools can help you make more accurate data-driven decisions faster!
PDF
PDFs are great in that they’re simple and clean. If you bill your hours, using a PDF export is a simple way to grab information for a client — either as an invoice or as proof of hours worked. If you don’t bill your hours, PDF exports can operate as simple timesheets to be used for internal tracking, 1:1 meetings or stakeholder updates for projects in progress.
From the drop down menu, select the file format that best suits your needs. You'll then see a new window with the report content you'd like to include:
You can adjust your export to include data from your Hours or Tasks using the buttons along the top, as well as select the appropriate data columns that you'd like to include.
You'll also see the option to export both your Entries & totals, just the Entries only, or just the Totals only - whichever works best for your needs!
Pro Tip: Removing the hours data source in the report will not automatically uncheck the hours columns in the export. You'd want to uncheck those unneeded columns for a more concise export.
If you are an admin level user, you can click the "Manage column order" button to set the order of those columns for export. Please note that this is a workspace level setting affecting all exports from the account.
🚨 Pay careful note of the column options as you perform your exports as the available data columns vary by file format (PDF versus CSV versus Excel) along with the type of Export, such as Tasks or Hours.
If Timely thinks your report is too large to download directly, it will send it to your Timely-registered email address within a few minutes. You'll see this notification:
Otherwise, your export will generate and download automatically to your browser's default download location.
Exporting timesheet reports
If you need to quickly create and export timesheets for yourself or your team, you can do so from the dedicated “Timesheets” tab within Reports as well. Simply set the date rate and select users, projects and tags to gather the info you need. Hit “Export” to download the report as an XLS, CSV or PDF file and you’re done!
Workspace level export options
Report Column Order
Workspace admin's have the ability to set the default order for report columns when creating files in the Excel and CSV file format. You'll just need to head over to the Settings section in Timely and click the "Workspace" header. Scroll down a bit and you'll see the various column titles available under the Hours and Tasks options, go ahead and click on the ::: dots icon to drag and drop those columns to suit your needs.
Note: Any changes to order here will affect the entire workspace, not just your individual user account.
Export multiple Timestamps
We know some folks love taking a deep dive into their data and getting a birds-eye view of their operations. With that in mind, we now offer the ability to export the individual time stamps from entries where applicable.
Enabling this option does affect the default columns in the export file for Excel or CSV, so just keep that in mind if you use any macros, automations, or formulas with these files regularly.
Important note - Once this workspace wide feature is enabled, it is permanent and can not be rolled back.
Report Columns
Workspace admins have the option in how they would like unselected columns to display when exporting.
For those that have complex macros or workflows that require the persistent presence of a column, regardless of data, they can choose to have that column be "included as blank". Meaning the column will still show up in the export, but the data will not.
For those that may like a clean and streamlined spreadsheet, you also have the option to "remove entirely" so that the column is hidden in the resulting file.
Report Tags
Workspace admins can also choose the default behavior for the handling of Tag lists in Excel or CSV export files. You can elect to display both the individual Tags and the overall Tag list they are associated with, just the individual Tags, or just the overall Tag list name.
