[Bug] Excel watcher stopped working properly

[dmantisk]

Te excel watcher now only picks up 'find and replace' and nothing else.

It used to work until 1 or 2 updates back (I don't remember which version broke it).

Activity watch (the original) still picks it up

[CODEX-cpp]

Hi, thanks for the info and the screenshots — very helpful.

How the Excel watcher works: unlike normal activity in the Timeline's general lane, the dedicated Excel watcher recognizes a file as open because it receives an "open" signal for it.

This watcher doesn't measure time the program is in the foreground — it measures the time from when the file was opened until it's closed.

If you'd rather monitor Excel like a normal app and only see foreground time, you can disable the dedicated Excel watcher (Watchers → Data sources, toggle next to "Excel activity"). Once disabled, Excel is tracked like any other app — foreground time only, not open-to-close. This is available starting with the latest release (v0.1.21), so make sure you're updated.

One hypothesis: at the moment of your screenshot, you may still have been working on that file, and the "close" signal hadn't been sent yet — so that session's activity wouldn't have been recorded yet either.

To actually fix the detection issue, I'd need a bit more info:

1. Which Excel version are you using? (Microsoft 365 / perpetual 2016, 2019, 2021 — and the build number, if you know it)
2. Do you have "Show all windows in the Taskbar" enabled or disabled?

If you can send me the app's log file, that would make it much easier to diagnose where the problem is. You'll find it here:

C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Local\it.trackflow.desktop\logs\TrackFlow.log

[dmantisk]

The open/close signaling seems to be part of the problem.

I checked the older entries and saw that some of the undetected excel activity shows up, but others don't.

Note that find at replace is shown without excel at the selected point in time

Edit : I actually prefer to make use of the dedicated/separate line for excel so not having to disable it would be nice

Requested items

1. Excel : Microsoft® Excel® 2021 MSO (Version 2608 Build 16.0.20326.20072) 64-bit

2. I'm not sure if this is what you are asking

3. The log : TrackFlow.log

[dmantisk]

If you'd rather monitor Excel like a normal app and only see foreground time, you can disable the dedicated Excel watcher (Watchers → Data sources, toggle next to "Excel activity"). Once disabled, Excel is tracked like any other app — foreground time only, not open-to-close. This is available starting with the latest release (v0.1.21), so make sure you're updated.

Disabling excel tracker didn't work as described;

• It still requires closing the file to show up in trackflow
• Excel was simply shown as a single item without differentiating the files

Is it possible to track excel without requiring the file to be closed and differentiate between files?

TrackFlow.log

[CODEX-cpp]

Hi @dmantisk, sorry for the late reply — we wanted to run more thorough tests on the actual root cause first before getting back to you.

We just published v0.1.25, which should fix your problem:

• The Excel watcher now tracks an open file right away (heartbeat-based) instead of waiting for it to be closed before anything shows up in the Timeline — a file kept open for hours now appears almost in real time.
• Fixed the false positive where "Find and Replace" (and the splash window shown while a file is opening) got tracked as if it were a real file.
• Fixed a bug where the same file open with multiple mode indicators at once (e.g. "[Read-only] [Shared]") could show up as several different "files" instead of one.

Could you update to v0.1.25 and check whether the problem persists?

If you'd like, feel free to re-enable the dedicated Excel watcher (Watchers → Data sources → "Excel activity") — it should now be fixed too, and correctly differentiate between files without needing to close them first.

Let us know how it goes, and thanks again for the detailed logs — they made this much easier to track down.