Google Sheets: A Live Timesheet That Updates Itself

A spreadsheet feed is a private link that returns minutes per member, project and day. Point Google Sheets or Excel at it once and the sheet refreshes itself — no exporting, no re-importing, and any formula, pivot or chart you build on top keeps working.

Creating the link

• Open API & Integrations in the left menu. If it is your first connection, accept the API access terms shown at the top.
• In Calendar and spreadsheet feeds choose Spreadsheet (CSV), type a label such as Monthly hours, and press Create feed link.
• The link appears once, in a yellow box, with a Copy button. Copy it now — it is not shown again.

Google Sheets

In an empty cell of a fresh sheet, enter:

=IMPORTDATA("https://www.screenish.com/feed/csv/<your link>")

The rows fill in below the formula and Sheets refreshes them on its own, roughly hourly. Build your pivot tables on a second sheet that reads from this one, so a refresh never overwrites your work.

Excel

Data > From Web, paste the link, press Load. The query lands as a table you can refresh with Data > Refresh All, or on a schedule through the query's properties.

The columns

One row per member, project and day: the date, the member (id, first and last name), the project (id and name), the minutes tracked, how many of them are approved, how many were entered manually and how many were idle. Hours are easy from there: minutes / 60.

Choosing the period

Without a period the feed returns the last 30 days. Add dates to the end of the link for a specific one:

...?from=2026-09-01&to=2026-09-30

A period may span at most 92 days. For a rolling month, leave the link plain; for a closed month that must not change, pin the dates.

Treat the link as a password

Anyone holding the link can read the feed, with no sign-in — and in Google Sheets the formula itself contains it, so everyone you share the spreadsheet with can read the link out of the cell. Share such a sheet only with people who may see the team's hours, or keep the importing sheet private and share a second one that references it. The feeds table shows when each link was last read and how many times; Revoke ends a link immediately, and the spreadsheet then shows an error instead of rows.

What a feed never carries

Hours, activity counts, member and project names. Never screenshots, application names, window titles, biometric data or pay rates.

For a file to hand to an accountant rather than a live sheet, see QuickBooks Time and Payroll: Exporting Timesheets. For the same rows in calendar form, see Google Calendar: Showing Tracked Time as Calendar Events.