Introduction

One of this year’s goals is to make it easier to use Daily’s data in other apps. Currently, this is mostly done by exporting data to CSV or JSON files, with optional automation via AppleScript.

While this has been on the roadmap for some time, development has now begun on a more powerful solution: an API and prebuilt integrations, likely through Zapier. This will enable Daily to seamlessly exchange data with thousands of other apps, eliminating the need for manual exporting, transforming, and importing.

To prepare for these upcoming capabilities, today’s update brings improvements that align Daily more closely with industry standards. Additionally, a new report type has been introduced, along with the option to export reports as PDFs.

Exporting to PDF

Daily now supports exporting reports as PDF files. This makes it easy to generate a readable, printable format; no need to open spreadsheet software first. It’s especially handy for sharing your tracked time with employers or clients, giving them a clear overview of what you’ve been working on and for how long.

You can choose between two report types:

Summary: Provides a total overview of your activities during the selected period.
Timesheet: Breaks down your activities by day, showing what you worked on and for how long each day.

Exporting timesheets

Prior to today’s update, Daily supported the following report types, depending on the export format (CSV, JSON, or PDF):

Summary: A total overview of your activities during the selected period.
Daily (CSV only): A day-by-day overview with dates as columns and activities as rows.
Activities (JSON only): A list of all activities and groups configured in Daily.

Today’s update adds a new report type: Timesheet. This report shows a detailed breakdown of your work per day, with each row representing an activity and the time spent on that activity on that specific day. This report type is available for all formats.

Filtering by group

You can now export data for activities belonging to a specific group. This is especially useful when you want to share only relevant information with an employer or client.

By default, all groups are included in exports. When you choose to filter by a specific group, the Include groups as separate values option is automatically ignored; no additional column (in CSV or PDF) or property (in JSON) is added for the group. Instead, only the activity names are included.

Changes to exported CSV files

To improve standardization and interoperability with other apps, the following changes have been made to exported CSV files:

Comments removed: Header rows starting with # have been removed, as they are not part of the RFC 4180 standard for CSV files and could cause issues when importing into other software.
Header row added: A standard header row is now included to describe the field (column) names. This helps spreadsheet software and other apps correctly interpret the data.
Date format standardized: Dates are now formatted as YYYY-MM-DD, following the ISO 8601 standard. This improves compatibility and reduces ambiguity when importing dates.
Percentage field removed: The field showing the percentage of each entry relative to the total duration has been removed for simplicity. If needed, this can be calculated within spreadsheet software.

Changes to exported JSON files

To keep things simple, the percentage property has been removed from the exported JSON. If needed, you can calculate it by comparing each entry’s duration to the total duration.

Changes to AppleScript commands

The delimiter argument is optional. If not specified, a comma (,) is used by default.
The time rounding argument is optional. If omitted, no rounding is applied. If included, Daily will apply the time rounding settings as configured in Daily's preferences.
The duration format argument is optional. If omitted, durations are specified in seconds.
When exporting to JSON, use timesheet as the report type instead of daily. For backward compatibility, daily will continue to work.
Support for the long-deprecated “legacy” format, originally introduced with Daily’s initial AppleScript support, has now been removed.

Refer to this FAQ and Daily's dictionary in Script Editor for more information about supported AppleScript commands.

Export to PDF and other improvements

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