Easiest way to create a graphical representation of Application Usage Report

applicationsms officeremote desktop

enter image description here I have several mac users who claim they need all 3 major browsers for testing websites and they need Admin privileges to keep them updated. (My Company doesn't support but Safari.)

I have run an Application Usage report for the last year on these users to pull what applications where used, how long, etc etc..

I have the data in Excel and I am trying to 'pie' chart the data so I can see what application they are really using the most. I have already split each user up into individual sheets. Has anyone else solved this problem (using Excel or even another tool)?

Best Answer

Presuming that you want to have a pie chart for each user, and you want to group by application, and by time spent with each, I would recommend using Excel to do so. In a nutshell:

Create a PivotChart for each user, with the data grouped as you prefer. In my exercise, I selected Application and Time. Highlight the columns, with the top row being the header, and select Insert | PivotChart. Check the fields to add to the report, in this case Application and Time.
You can configure your chart to your liking. I tend to add value labels to my pie chart slices.

You can see my crude, 5 minute example below.

PieChart

Related Solutions

Easiest way to send multiple iWork attachments as Office documents

There is no easy way to convert iWork documents to Office and then send them via email. In short, your options are as follows:

In Pages, don't save as .pages files, but rather as .docx files. To do this, your grandmother will have to use "save as" every time she saves the file, because "save" will simply save a .pages file. You cannot set the default file format in Pages to be a .docx file.
Continue as she is doing now, and convert each file individually from .pages to .docx when she needs to send it to someone.
Buy a legal copy of Office:Mac.

If your grandmother works with people who use Office, the best solution is for her to use Office:Mac. Pages can open Word documents, and it can save as a Word document as well, but this conversion is limited. If the documents have a lot of formatting, they are likely to lose the formatting in the conversion. If she receives Word documents with macros, she will not be able to use or modify the macros. Keynote to PowerPoint and Numbers to Excel have similar issues. We'll leave aside that it sounds like you have violated the EULA for iWork in associating someone else's Apple ID with your grandmother's new Mac.

"Send Windows-Friendly Attachments" does not convert files from one type to another, and you probably don't want Apple Mail (or any other application) performing such a conversion without telling you about it. It simply changes the encoding that it uses for sending the files via email.

There is no method to batch-convert files from Pages to Word. Pages' AppleScript and Automator dictionaries don't have commands for such a conversion.

MacOS – How to launch a GUI application in another user’s graphical session

What you want to achieve is possible but difficult. You need to launch the application within the appropriate user session. For security reasons, crossing the user session divide is difficult.

You need a process already running in the other user's session to listen to your request and launch the application on your behalf.

launchd's bsexec

Thankfully, recent versions of launchd have this ability; although Apple engineers have not recommended its general use. Use the bsexec option in launchctl to target the appropriate user session:

 bslist [PID | ..] [-j]
          This prints out Mach bootstrap services and their respective states. While the namespace
          appears flat, it is in fact hierarchical, thus allowing for certain services to be only avail-
          able to a subset of processes. The three states a service can be in are active ("A"), inactive
          ("I") and on-demand ("D").

          If [PID] is specified, print the Mach bootstrap services available to that PID. If [..] is
          specified, print the Mach bootstrap services available in the parent of the current bootstrap.
          Note that in Mac OS X v10.6, the per-user Mach bootstrap namespace is flat, so you will only
          see a different set of services in a per-user bootstrap if you are in an explicitly-created
          bootstrap subset.

          If [-j] is specified, each service name will be followed by the name of the job which regis-
          tered it.

 bsexec PID command [args]
          This executes the given command in the same Mach bootstrap namespace hierachy as the given
          PID.

 bstree [-j]
          This prints a hierarchical view of the entire Mach bootstrap tree. If [-j] is specified, each
          service name will be followed by the name of the job which registered it.  Requires root priv-
          ileges.

The recommended approach is to write a launchd job ticket and restart the Mac - or ask the user to log-out and back in again.

Cause of the Problems

The problems stem from the application being connected to the wrong WindowServer process. Each user session has a separate WindowServer; this process handles the user interface. Your earlier methods place the ownership of the process with the right user but connected to your own WindowServer process.

This problem is mentioned in the Daemons and Agents technical note from Apple.

Experience

I know this from personal experience. For Power Manager, I wrote pmuser to exist within each user session. pmuser listens to our daemon and handles the per-user launches and commands. Despite our daemon having root authority, we still needed a per-user process to work reliably within user sessions.