Comma-Separated Values Format

The Comma-Separated Values format used by Vitamin-R’s Export feature follows the usual conventions of CSV files and can be used by a number of different applications, including Apple’s Numbers spreadsheet application and Microsoft Excel.

You may create this CSV file by: Vitamin-R 3 ⇒ Tools ⇒ Logs ⇒ Export as CSV File

The first line of the CSV file defines the columns that are used:

uuid,start,end,actualDuration,success,completed,objective

The “uuid” column contains the Universally Unique Identifier for the time slice. This value can be used to uniquely identify a particular time slice and can be used to correlate the exported data with the time slice details in Vitamin-R’s log files. Most users will never have to use this value.

The “start” and “end” columns contain the time at which the time slice started and ended, respectively. Both of these values are enclosed in quotes (which should be ignored by the user) and have the standardized YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS (24 hour clock) format which is widely supported, particularly easy to parse programmatically, and is easily sorted – even in programs that treat the value as a string. Note that the interval between the start and end of the time slice is not necessarily the same as the total duration of the time slice, as the time slice might have been paused one or more times.

The “actualDuration” column contains the actual duration of the time slice, expressed in seconds. This, for most people, will be the most useful time value recorded by Vitamin-R. Obviously, you will divide by 60 to get minutes, by 60 again to get hours, etc.

The “success” and “completed” values indicate whether the time slice was deemed to be a success and/or the Objective was completed. If the corresponding checkbox was ticked in the Rate Your Time Slice panel, it will show a value of true. If it was not, the value will be set to false.

The “objective” column contains the objective as it was given as plain text (UTF-8 encoded) and will have lost all formatting, image data, etc. It may still, however, be multi-line (i.e. contain new line characters). The convention for free-text multiline fields in CSV is that:

• the text will be enclosed in quotes if it contains a new line character, a comma or a quote
• any quotes in the text will be “escaped” by another quote immediately in front of it

An example will make this easier to understand:

I say “hello, world”

will be encoded as

"I say ""hello world"""

For more details about CSV conventions, please consult Wikipedia.