The Scenario
IT is doing a quarterly software audit. HR sent a list of 35 remote employees. Legal wants to know whether people are spending time in approved productivity tools or in apps that violate the acceptable-use policy.
You've been handed the DeskTime admin credentials and a blank Google Sheet labeled "AppUsageAudit." There's no further instruction. The report is due to the compliance officer by end of week.
You log into DeskTime and find the app usage report. It shows one employee at a time. You're looking at 35 employees and you need data for a specific day.
The bad version:
- You click into employee 1, switch to the app usage view, change the date filter, screenshot or copy the table
- You paste it into the sheet, fix the column headers to match the standard format legal specified, move to employee 2
- By employee 9 the paste formatting has drifted and you spend fifteen minutes realigning columns before continuing
You don't have until Friday to do this manually. You have three other deliverables open. And the compliance officer's version of "end of week" is Thursday at noon.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the sheet, connects to DeskTime through its built-in integration, and can pull app usage data for every employee in one request — no clicking through individual profiles.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and paste this:
Get all DeskTime employees, then for each one fetch their tracked apps for 2026-05-12 and write employee name, app name, time spent, and productivity category into the AppUsageAudit sheet
What You Get
- Column A: employee full name
- Column B: app name as logged by DeskTime
- Column C: time spent in that app (formatted as HH:MM)
- Column D: DeskTime's productivity category (Productive, Unproductive, Neutral)
- Multiple rows per employee, one per app logged that day
- Employees with no app activity on the specified date appear with a single row noting no data
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
I only want unproductive or neutral apps — filter out the approved ones
Get all DeskTime employees and their app usage for 2026-05-12. Only include apps where the productivity category is Unproductive or Neutral. Write employee name, app name, time spent, and category into the AppUsageAudit sheet.
I want to rank by time spent and only see the top 3 apps per employee
Fetch app usage from DeskTime for all employees for 2026-05-12. For each employee, keep only the 3 apps where they spent the most time. Write employee name, app name, and time into the AppUsageAudit sheet, sorted by employee name then by time descending.
Cross-reference against our approved apps list
Pull DeskTime app usage for all employees for 2026-05-12. For each app, check if it appears in the ApprovedApps tab (column A). If it does, mark column E as "Approved." If it doesn't, mark column E as "Review required."
Full audit: pull usage, flag policy violations, and add a per-employee summary
Fetch DeskTime app usage for all 35 employees for 2026-05-12. Write employee name, app name, time spent, and category into columns A–D of AppUsageAudit. Flag any app not in the ApprovedApps tab with "Policy review" in column E. Below the main table, add a per-employee summary showing total time in approved vs. unapproved apps.
One prompt. Compliance has what it needs.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a blank Google Sheet, then ask it to pull yesterday's DeskTime app usage data for your whole team. The DeskTime integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. You might also want to look at pulling employee productivity stats or the DeskTime overview hub.