Posted on 07/02/2007 7:38:03 AM PDT by Salo
Oh. Sorry. I forgot you work for microsoft. Until the ridicule, scorn and sarcasm directed at a customer with a problem reminded me.
22 KB is not very big. What size should it have?
I don’t work for Microsoft.
Have you checked in your temp area? Sometimes you get lucky and documents, or substantial parts of them, end up there.
Bingo, sort of. I downloaded the attachment and worked on in in orifice.
Office has a long standing habit of getting itself confused by doc files in e-mails, especially if you’re using Outlook.
"As for Outlook... I've used it for years without any problem. It's better than any other mail/calendar/contact manager I've seen." ~ HairOfTheDog
The problem comes in that Outlook (and other e-mail apps) make temporary versions of these files and with Word works on them it works on the temp version so unless you specifically redirected the save location out of Outlook’s favorite temp folder it saved there, then if you closed the e-mail without saving your changes are gone.
ACK!
If you got lucky and actually saved the changes to the e-mail and you still have the e-mail you might actually get your post modification version of the doc.
I thought I was saving it as a new document. I even changed the file name.
Another possibility is that you were logged in as a different user so your current user knows nothing about the doc.
Don't think so.
There are lots of ways to confuse Office.
Really???
On the bright side, this is only delaying my provisional patent app, and the venture capitalist is only hinging $2-5M on it.
The rule of thumb used to be one full page of text was ~1 KB.
22KB seems a bit high for an utterly blank page.
Well, OK then... That explains where the error came from, working on the attachment is an easy place for you to have made an error. Did you save the email or not?
As a matter of habit, I copy attachments to my own location if I’m going to change them, so that I can keep a record of what the original was, and so that I file it in the right place.
Good habit to get into.
But it's not just text. It's a Document with formatting in it, even if you've not typed anything, it has a default font, margins, print settings, all kinds of information. It's not just text any more.
You should.
Yes. But the modified file is simply gone. The old one is there in all its incomplete glory.
If they would agree, I would agree. :~D
So... do you want it saving things or not? Make up your mind!
Just as a point of interest, I also worked on an Excel file attached to the selfsame e-mail. It saved that with absolutely no problems or errors.
Use me as a reference?
Nully, it’ll save what you tell it to save, if you do it right. I understand how you made the error... I’ve done it. It’s far better to save a copy to your own folder before working on it than it is to work in the attachment. At some point it asked you if you wanted to save the attachment, and you quite simply answered wrong.
Did you download it via a browser? Browsers tend to do the same kind of stuff e-mail apps do. The core problem is temp files and who owns them. When you open a Word doc via e-mail or a browser what Word is actually being handed is a temp file, and worse still a temp file that it doesn’t own. Unless you’re either very careful or very lucky the non-Word application is going to maintain ownership of that file and will probably either revert or delete the file. And unfortunately because the modern world is built around “seamless” integrations you pretty much need to know you’re at risk of running into these problem to avoid them, Word doesn’t know it’s working with a file it doesn’t own, it was told to open this file for editing so it did. And it’s not an MS only thing, I know people that work on Macs or Linux that have run into similar problems, integrating products so well the user doesn’t have to think about it means the user often doesn’t think about it.
For future stuff here’s some habits I developed to avoid this particular problem (which has bitten me multiple times):
Don’t open documents you intend to change from inside a browser or e-mail app, save them to your hard drive somewhere and work from that
If you do wind up opening the doc from inside a different app do a save as and make sure you put your saved as in a folder other than the default, the default is going to the folder your browser/ e-mail stores temporary files and will periodically be cleaned up (some apps do a better job of cleaning up than others, for you the better the app cleans up the worse it is for you), changing the file name is often not enough because that’s still going to leave it in the temp folder and some apps kill their entire folder on shutdown
When in doubt before closing Office open up Windows Explorer and see if you can find the file, open it (this will probably lead to Office complaining the file is already open, but it should still let you get to it read only), and verify your changes are actually in it
If you follow those three steps you’ll be fine, and once you train yourself to always do 1 or 2 you don’t have to do 3.
As for finding your file, first thing to do is look to see if there’s something really goofy in your recent documents list. If you have something that looks like ~1234567.tmp that might be your document. If you don’t get that lucky figure out where the app you used to access the file keeps its temps and go poking through the files in there, turn on thumbnail views and any Word docs in there should (OK let’s say might) show their first page. If neither of those works then you’re probably SOL.
Sadly many VC funds have been lost because computers like to appear smarter than they are. I hope you find it.
I can forgive it that, but what irks me is that it doesn’t show it as a "Recent Document".
Well, duh! Even if I saved it in the wrong place, or with a wrong name, it should still remember that I spent hours working on it! What else would "Recent Documents" mean???
Salo pointed me in the right direction and I was able to recover a full day’s work, even if the damm application insisted that I did nothing memorable that day.
Sage advice.
Default, dear Brutus lies not in the stars, but within our computers...
we must live close, mine is 192.168.1.1
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