Check Facebook on the sly in the office with “excel”

Take a look around your average office and what do you see? Chances are, rather than the office serf toiling away for the capitalist boss, you’ll see him or her pretending to toil whilst furtively “checking” Facebook.

In 2007 a widely-reported study found that “233 million hours are lost every month as a result of employees ‘wasting time’ on social networking”, equalling over £130million in lost revenues. Like we needed to be told that.

It’s hardly surprising that companies around the world have been blocking access to Facebook. But with more than 257-million quick-and-ready tips from Googling “how to get around a Facebook block”… that “block” becomes a mere “ban”.

So here’s a nifty little app that can help the proletariat’s ongoing struggle for Facebook access. The app, aptly titled Hardlywork.in, turns your Facebook feed into a boss-friendly spreadsheet.

In the application’s own words:

Feeling unprofessional when you check your Facebook profile at the office? Well there’s nothing more professional than a nice spreadsheet. Sign in with Facebook below, and see your news feed rendered into an innocuous corporate form.

And unlike a trove of Facebook applications of this ilk, it actually works.

Once you grant access to Hardlywork.in, after asking you, the “little corporate warrior” to hang in there, a very convincing spreadsheet titled, “Daily Cash Flow” comes up.

Not only does it allow you to view your News Feed in excel format, Hardlywork.in gives you much of the basic functions you’d expect from Facebook.

You can search for a particular friend’s feed — or more likely during the midday slump, what your ex is up to.

Hovering over Likes or comments on a post will even allow you to see who liked it or read the comments.

Speaking with the Huffington Post, Bay Gross, the 20-year old Yale student who created the app, said the idea came to him after a friend of his complained she couldn’t read the links he posted on Facebook. After a marathon 18-hour coding session, the crafty tool was launched. With just three days of being live, the app was seeing 10 000 unique visitors per day.

However, should your boss have a sharper eye than most, the best feature on the app is when you hit your space-bar. From columns showing Facebook content, Likes and comments, it switches to “Boss Mode” changing everything into the career-advancement-friendly numbers and Excel sums.

Of course, Memeburn in no way endorses the use of such tools, we’re only here to inform you of their existence.