Do they grow the cotton first?

Oh dear. Typo in local newspaper this week:

Unfortunately, a person who sews can be called a ‘sewer’ (pron. so-er), but that can be easily misread as ‘sewer’ (pron. sue-er) as in the human waste disposal system.

It’s possible that the person who wrote this headline saw ‘sewers’ and thought it looked too much like the waste system, and thus changed it to ‘sower’, which has a totally different meaning altogether and means a person who plants seeds.

Further on in the copy, they got it right as ‘sewers’, but that headline was just plain wrong. If the headline writer wasn’t sure about ‘sewers’ then perhaps they should have reworded the headline to something like ‘Members come from far and wide’ or ‘National sewing guild AGM popular’ or similar.

Which reminds me..

When I attended a quilt workshop in Texas earlier this year, Laura Wasilowski did a ‘show and tell’ presentation where she told us about finding the tomb of the unknown sewer… ;-)

Tomb of the unknown sewer

[Photo from http://ww3.brevardcounty.us/usd/faq.cfm]

[Links last checked 25 July 2012]

Quick way to capture screens to show problems

This is for Windows 7 users only (and presumably later versions of Windows).

There’s a handy little tool in Windows 7 that records — in text and single images — each mouse click. It’s called the Problem Steps Recorder and it is very very basic, but it could be very handy if you’re trying to troubleshoot a problem someone is having with their computer when they don’t have the knowledge or the software to capture screen shots or set up screen sharing with you.

1. In Windows 7, click the Start button.
2. Type psr.exe in the search box and open it. This displays the small Problem Steps Recorder toolbar.
   
3. Click Start Record.
4. Your entire screen will be captured as will every mouse click you do.
5. Once you’ve finished clicking to emulate the problem, click Stop Record on the Problem Steps Recorder toolbar.
6. You are asked to save the resulting file as a ZIP file. Give it a file name and save it.
7. Before sending the file to someone else, check that you captured everything you needed to capture by opening the zip file, then double-clicking the MHT file inside it to show it. If you’re using WinZip, you’ll get a warning about this being a potentially unsafe file. As you’ve just recorded it, it’s safe, so click Yes open it.
   
8. Internet Explorer opens with a single page that displays all your screen shots in the order you captured them, with green outlines around the areas you clicked. You can view this as a slide show too. Internet Explorer also warns you about making sure you only captured what you needed to, and, at the end of the web page, lists in text the application(s) you were using under ‘Additional Details’.
9. If you’re happy with the result, you can now email the zip file to the person who needs to troubleshoot your problem.

Other information:

• If you have two monitors, both monitors are captured in the one screen shot.
• If the details are hard to read, you can click on an image to see it larger, then click on it again to zoom in. Text on the image may be a little fuzzy but it’s readable for troubleshooting purposes.
• By default, up to 25 screens captures are recorded, but you can change this setting by clicking the drop-down arrow next to the Help button and selecting Settings — the maximum number is 100.

This tip is an expansion of the tip in the July 2012 issue of Australian Personal Computer magazine (p83).

Neat trick to minimise windows

This tip comes from the July 2012 issue of Australian Personal Computer magazine (p83):

Click and shake the title bar of the window you want to keep open. All others windows will minimize to the taskbar.

This works in Windows 7, but not in earlier Windows versions.

Unfortunate URL shortening

Great article, pity about how the URL was automatically shortened where it was! ;-)

You can read the article here: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html

[Link last checked 21 July 2012]

Confusing warning

Here’s a warning I saw the other day (click the image to see it full size if it’s unclear):

But what does it mean? The first part is simple and clear enough, but what’s the ‘(For Australia and New Zealand only)’ bit all about?

Does it mean that only young children and infirm persons in Australia/NZ can’t use this sewing machine without supervision, but they can if they don’t live in Australia/NZ? or if they aren’t operating the machine in Australia/NZ?

My guess is that there’s some sort of regulatory compliance thing happening here, where the Australian and New Zealand authorities require specific wording in a warning for certain products.

But it’s not clear.

Microsoft Word crashes: Recovery options

Microsoft has definitely improved the stability of software like Word over the years. The days of complex Word documents crashing regularly are a thing of the past, in my experience. Since Word 2003, I’ve rarely had Word crash on me — and in the past few years I’ve worked on some pretty long and complex documents with lots of section breaks, complex tables, large figures, and track changes turned on. I’ve worked in Word 2003, Word 2007, and Word 2010, and I can’t recall the last time Word crashed on me. And if it did, there was an option to let Word try to recover as much of the document as possible.

So it was surprising that I heard of several work colleagues experiencing regular crashes in Word 2007. These were the same documents I’d worked on just days and sometimes hours before with no problem at all.

The main difference between how they worked and how I worked was that all those experiencing crashes were working directly on the documents within SharePoint, whereas I work via VPN and check out the document from SharePoint and get SharePoint to save it locally to my default SharePoint directory until such time as I’m ready to check it back in (effectively, SharePoint downloads the document to my local machine, and uploads it again when I’m finished with it — I don’t work on the document over the network, as my colleagues do). But before we could point the finger at SharePoint as being the issue causing the crashes, I suggested that we take a staged approach to identifying what was causing Word to crash.

Remember, these documents are complex:

• they can be several hundred pages long
• they can have up to 100 section breaks for portrait/landscape and A3 page orientations and sizes, and they have odd/even pages for each section
• they can have many tables, some of which can be quite complex with merged cells, sideways text etc.
• they can have many figures
• track changes are turned on from one revision to the next
• each document can have multiple authors or reviewers who add their track changes and comments
• they can have hundreds of comments from reviewers
• document automation (fields and bookmarks) populates the headers and footers and some of the front matter
• appendices are common
• outline numbering is used for all headings, including appendices
• macros enable the automation of some regular tasks
• they can have many styles that aren’t in the template — before I do my review of the document, authors may have introduced many styles from copy/pasting from other documents without realizing that they are adding to the list of styles
• automated captions and cross-references abound
• and so on…

Add to that, working over a network and/or within SharePoint.

Any of the things listed above might contribute to the instability of a document — there are lots of things that Word has to keep track of and lots of things that could potentially go wrong. When I look at some of these documents, I’m surprised that Word remains as stable as it does!

So if your Word documents are crashing regularly, you need to take steps to see if you can get the document stable again. Trying to figure out why it’s happening is probably impossible, so let’s look at my suggested hierarchy of things to try, starting with a gentle nudge and working up to a sledge hammer approach.

NOTE: If you can’t even open the document, try some of the suggestions and links in this blog post: https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2021/06/29/word-has-errors-and-wont-open/

Before you start

Make a copy of the document! Only try the steps below on a copy of the document. If everything goes pear-shaped, at least you’ll have your original (though unstable) document to go back to.

Step 1: Save As

The first step is to save the document under a new file name (even just adding 02 to the file name, for example, saves it as a new document). Sometimes doing that will solve the problem that’s causing the crashes. It’s a quick and easy option to try. If it works and you don’t get any further crashes, then you can delete the old file and save or rename the new one with the original file name, if that file name is important to you.

‘Save as’ preserves everything, including all track changes, comments etc.

Step 2: Save As RTF

If you’re still getting crashes, try saving the document as a Rich Text Format (RTF) file — it’s one of the file type options available when you do a ‘Save As’. Then ‘Save as’ back again to a DOC/DOCX file, perhaps changing the file name in the process. Again, this is a quick and easy option to test.

‘Save as RTF’ seems to preserve everything too, though it may blow out your file size (the document I tested this on was 300 KB — it blew out to 13 MB as an RTF, but dropped back to 300 KB when I saved it back to DOCX).

Step 3: Get it off the network/SharePoint and work on it locally

Network latency issues, flaky connections, or issues with SharePoint (if you use it) can all contribute to a document crashing. To see if it’s the network and NOT the document or Word, save the document to your local drive and work on it locally. If you get no further crashes, then something on/in the network is likely the culprit. This will be very difficult for you to pinpoint, so report it to your IT department.

Again, this is a quick and easy option to test.

Don’t forget to upload your document back to the network storage location (or check it back into SharePoint) when you’ve finished with it. And let anyone else who might be wanting to work on the document know that you’re working on it locally and for them not to touch it until you’ve told them you’re finished with it and the new version is back where it belongs.

Step 4: Repair Office

Sometimes, Word is the culprit, not your document. If all or most of your documents are crashing regularly and you’ve tried the steps above without success, then you need to look at something being wrong with Word itself. If these same documents are not crashing for anyone else under the same circumstances, then your installation of Word is also likely the culprit.

You can repair Word from inside Word 2007 (Office button > Word Options > Resources > Run Microsoft Office Diagnostics).

But if you’re using Word 2010, you’ll have to do the repair from the Control Panel (Control Panel > Programs and Features, select Microsoft Office 2010, click Change, then select Repair). Microsoft changed this for Office 2010 (details here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc178954.aspx).

Step 5: Accept as many tracked changes as possible

Tracked changes add a lot of ‘overhead’ to a Word document, so if you can, accept/reject as many tracked changes as you possibly can. All of them, if possible.

However, you may work in an environment (as I do) where track changes are required for regulatory purposes, at least while the document is undergoing revision. There may be some that can be dealt with that aren’t required for regulator approval, such as track changes to fields, formatting changes, minor punctuation or case changes that don’t change the meaning of the text, deletion/addition of spaces or non-breaking spaces, etc. So deal with as many of these as possible.

Step 6: Do a ‘Maggie’ on the document

Named after the person who first documented this technique (Maggie Secara, who passed suddenly in late July 2019), to ‘Maggie’ a Word document means to copy everything in it EXCEPT the very last paragraph mark (make sure you turn on the Show/Hide icon to see the paragraph marks) and then paste it into a new document. When you see the Paste Options button (at the end of the document), select Keep Source Formatting. Save the new document with a different file name.

It seems that a lot of the Word formatting and other ‘instructions’ are hidden behind or stored in that last paragraph marker and we mortals never get to see them. So by copying everything except the last paragraph marker into a new document, you may leave behind whatever was causing the corruption.

You may still have some tidying up with the styles, page layout settings, etc. to do after doing this — sometimes reapplying the template will help. But you will need to check the entire document and make sure everything is as it should be. The quick bit of this technique is the copy/paste; checking the document and reapplying styles, page layouts etc. will take a bit of time. However, in the tests I did, everything seems to be preserved.

‘Doing a Maggie’ has saved many an unstable Word document from complete corruption.

Step 7: Create a new document and copy/paste the old into it as plain text

This is the most time consuming and frustrating option and there’s NO guarantee that anything except the text will be preserved, especially things like track changes.

If you paste as plain text into a new document, you will have to:

• reapply styles
• reinsert captions
• reassign cross-references
• somehow redo the tracked changes
• reinsert comments
• reinsert section breaks
• reinsert headers/footers, etc.

Reapplying the template to the document will help when it comes to reapplying styles, but everything else will have to be done manually.

This method is ONLY recommended if you’ve tried absolutely everything else and the document is still unstable.

If you have any other suggestions for rescuing an unstable Word document, please add them to the Comments below. Good luck!

[Links last checked 18 July 2012]

Acrobat Help? Not very helpful

I needed to find something in the Acrobat Pro X online help, but instead of the Help loading and offering me a search function, I got this message:

I *was* connected to the internet, and I could access all sorts of sites. But no matter what I did, I kept getting this message and the Help never displayed.

Why oh why isn’t there an option to search the Help on my computer (assuming there’s a Help system for this application stored on my computer)? Why does the Help need to access the internet before it displays? Why didn’t it work even though I had access to the internet? What do people do who aren’t connected to the internet at the time they want to get Help (e.g. at a remote location, in a plane, in an area where access is unreliable, etc.)?

I’ve ranted about Adobe’s shifting of Help to ‘the cloud’ before (the horrible ‘Community Help’ used in Captivate 5: https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/captivate-5-first-experiences-of-using-community-help/), but this situation of not even being able to choose whether to view the locally installed Help or the Help available on the internet is doing a disservice to users.

While Microsoft also has internet-based Help as the default for their Office programs, you can change the option to search the locally installed Help instead.

Did I find my answer? Sort of, via someone’s blog via an internet search external to Acrobat. But it’s not the official Help, which is what I wanted.

[Link last checked 18 July 2012]

How to find out author and date details for a PDF

Peter, a work colleague, wanted to know how to reference a PDF he’d located on a government website. There was no identifying information on the PDF — there was a date, a semblance of a title, but no authoring body, and the headers and footers offered only a variation of the title. He couldn’t guess the authoring body from the website address as this government department had changed names several times over the years since the publication date.

Here’s the top of page 1 of the PDF so you can see his dilemma:

Fortunately, I was able to help him. By looking at the Document Properties for the PDF, I identified the author and the correct title for this document and Peter was able to complete his bibliography.

How?

First, right-click anywhere in the PDF and select Document Properties.

Then check the details on the Description tab.

In this example, the full title was listed (1), along with the correct authoring body at the time the document was created (2), and the date it was created (3).

By the way, I’m pretty sure that this information comes from the metadata of the original software that was used to create the document (e.g. Microsoft Word), so while it’s good that it’s available in the PDF’s document properties, don’t rely on it 100%.

(based on a Writing Tip I wrote for my work colleagues)