How to Throw Away a Lot of Work

One of our people had a very disheartening experience recently while on deadline. She had emailed an Excel file to herself from a client's system as an attachment. Because she was in a hurry, when she got back to the office she simply opened the email, double-clicked on the attached file in her email to open it in Excel, and started editing. The file took a lot of editing -- several hours' worth -- and she dutifully saved it regularly. When she was done she saved it one final time, closed Excel, and opened an email to send it back to the client's site. It was only then that she remembered she had opened it from the email.

The first question, of course, was: Where is it? Attached to the original email? Nope, opening the email and opening the attachment brought back the original file. In My Documents? Nice thought, but not there either. At this point she asked for help from the techie. We did a search by date through her disks to see if maybe there was a copy somewhere or even a temp file with the correct date/time stamp. Still no joy. We finally had to admit defeat and did a group edit to reproduce the changes (fortunately the required changes were listed in a separate text file).

So what happened? Well, this is the only system in our office still running Windows 98 and an older version of Office (both scheduled for an upgrade 6 months ago but client work has taken priority). And apparently Windows 98 does not store a file opened directly from email even though Excel does a wonderful imitation of storing it and doesn't object in the slightest when you close the file.

We tried the same experiment on a system running Windows 2000 Pro and Office 2000. This gave better (but not great) results -- it did store the file but in a very obscure place (C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\Recent). We found it by doing a date-based search.

So if you are going to edit a file you receive as an attachment, store it on your disk first and avoid, at very least, a lengthy search and, at worst, a lot of wasted work.

Why Your System's Clock Should be Right

Like the flashing 12:00 on most VCRs, computer clocks are mostly ignored. Unfortunately, as websites get more complex, the accuracy of your computer's clock will become more important. This is because many web-based applications use a time-comparison to decide what information to send to you. Sometimes it's simply a question of what day it is, but sometimes the exact time is important. At first the solution seems simple: Use the server time. But servers can be anywhere in the world, in any time zone. A server in Japan, for example, which is on the other side of the International Date Line, is a day ahead of a user on the east coast of the US for 12 hours each day.

This is usually solved by using the time in the user's computer as the reference. But if your system's time is set incorrectly, the data you get may be incorrect.

The fix is to make sure that time synchronizing is enabled (for Windows 2000 or XP) or to install a free time synchronizing utility (for earlier versions of Windows). Contact us if you need help with either.

Here's a technical trivia question to mull over: The Internet uses Greenwich Mean Time (represented by the abbreviation GMT) for a universal time reference. Technically, GMT has been superceded by Coordinated Universal Time, which is abbreviated as UTC. The trivia question is: What is UTC an acronym for and in what language? Answer next time.

Thanks for joining us this month. See you next month.