Word Still Immature
I have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft Word -- with the emphasis on hate. Over the years I have religiously set autorecover to save every five minutes because Word has crashed countless times (you'd need a Cray to do that math). And many is the time that autorecover has failed to autorecover. Because of this I am in the habit of printing files I've spent a lot of time on, and more than once I've used OCR to recover my work.
I recently fired up my Win 7 laptop only to find it froze overnight. I relauched Word 2007 and, sure enough, there were four files in the autorecover pane. I opened three that were all fine. So assuming the best I agreed I did not need to save the fourth recovered file. D'oh. This was a 4,000-word draft of a cover story you all helped me write. It's about whether our networks are ready to handle the cloud.
What I found when I opened the file was not an almost-ready-for-production piece of mastery, but a hodgepodge of sketchy notes.
I tried a variety of techniques from the Web but that file has resisted all attempts at recovery. I finally found a completely non-intuitive way to get the file back. Go to open and click on all file types. The darn thing was sitting right there.
Unfortunately the files are stripped of formatting. In its place was text referring to the formatting codes and a bunch of other gobbledygook you have to strip out. Nice work guys.
I have three concerns: The recovery was far from obvious. Why, when you ask it to autosave every five minutes, does it give me an old file? And why do Win 7 and Word 2007 still crash?
How about Microsoft stops futzing around with Ribbons and get the basic stuff right?
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/04/2011 at 1:18 PM