Damn and Blast

I suppose this was somewhat inevitable and bound to happen to me at some point during university life but I genuinely thought I was prepared for this kind of eventuality never mind accidentally causing it myself. I am referring to losing work on a computer, most commonly caused by lack of power or a crash etc but in my case, caused by my hands working faster than my brain and sheer stupidity on the part of the designers of Microsoft Office 2007.

What happened was, I was happily working away on typing up my notes and I went to insert an equation. This module is full of equations and it makes it much easier to read if they are formatted nicely on the page so I use the equation editor - which to give them some credit has made my life so much easier compared to the previous incarnation. As it is such a frequently used feature, I have assigned a shortcut to it Ctrl + Q. Nothing wrong with that you might think until you look at the letter immediately next to 'Q', 'W'. Following yet? No? Let me explain, Ctrl + W is a common shortcut for 'close window' - in a web browser it might close the current tab for example and in Word, it closes the current document. Now the next thing that happens is where it becomes more frustrating. A small window pops up with the message "Do you want to save the changes you have made?" and before I know it, my fingers have pressed the 'N' key and my work has vanished from sight.

At this point, something that I very rarely do happened; I did a double take as I couldn't quite believe what had happened. How could I have been so silly as to have press 'No' instead of 'Yes'? Ah well, nevermind, at least I should have only lost about five or ten minutes work. No. (and this is where the idiot designers come in) Because in this version of word, the autosave function works slightly differently. Instead of saving your work, it saves auto recover information for your work every so often and to add insult to injury, this is deleted when you close the program. So it's fine for those occasions when you lose power and don't actually close the program but if you make a silly mistake like I just did, or someone does the equivalent as a joke - you are pretty screwed. I had in fact lost about two hours work because I rarely even consider saving anything unless I leave the computer. Laptops have batteries so power cuts are no problem and very rarely does my computer actually crash anymore so I have had no reason to think about such trivial matters.

I spent the next two hours trying desperately to recover even a small scrap of work when really I should have been retyping. Thankfully all was not lost and after a lot of digging, I managed to recover some backup files which had about an hour and a half's worth of writing in them. In a small side note, I tested two pieces of recover software - FreeUndelete and Recuva. In the quick scan test, FreeUndelete recovered more information than Recuva but the latter's deep scan feature out trumped the former by a mile. Not only did it find thousands of files but it had useful information about what had overwritten the file in question. Some of the files I was looking for had been damaged because I had to install the software on the disk after they had been deleted but now I have them, next time it should be less of a problem. Take note, make sure you install some sort of recovery software first otherwise you risk facing the same problem!

Needless to say, I have now removed the Ctrl + W shortcut assignment and am considering working on an autosave macro of sorts that might do the saving for me. I'm not an expert with Visual Basic so it may all end badly but with a bit of luck I can cobble something crude together that does the job.

I will end on a lighter note and that is with regards to the National Television Awards that were held this evening. The lifetime achievement award this year could not have gone to a more deserving person - Mr Stephen Fry. In my eyes he can do no wrong and I hope he continues to grace us and out TVs with his presence for years to come. Also, I am now in Sheffield once more and have just about unpacked everything. Trying to fit the TV in my room on top of an old laptop and a lot of other junk is proving rather tricky - mainly in the electrical outlet department which I now seem to be short of by about three.