For those who write for a living, a tool for keeping track of writing progress can come in rather handy in many situations. If you are a freelancer, knowing how much time you spent on a specific document can help you to bill your customers. And the ability to identify productivity peaks provides an invaluable tool for more efficient writing. All of this and much more is possible thanks to the EuroOffice My Progress (EOMP) extension for OpenOffice.org.

Once installed, the extension adds two items to the Tools menu: Track My Progress and Display My Progress. The former enables tracking for the currently opened document, while the latter generates a detailed report based on the gathered data. The way EOMP works is rather straightforward. When activated, the extension saves the word count and paragraph count every minute. All these data are stored in the document itself, so the extension tracks your writing progress whenever you work on the document. To analyze the data, choose Tools -> Display my Progress, and the extension generates a detailed report containing several charts, including daily progress and minute-by-minute progress. Moreover, the Daily Data and Minute Data sheets provide detailed break downs of the collected data which you can use to analyze your writing progress.