Microsoft Evil After All
I’m pretty much in the tank for Office 2007, especially Excel and Outlook. The unfairly maligned Fluent interface is fantastic once you climb the learning curve. But, unless I’m missing it, the productivity programs still, all these years later, lack a “Save to Backup” feature. If I’m working on an article called “The Big Waste” and I want to save a frozen version of my current draft while continuing to work on my main document, I can’t do that. I’d like to have “The Big Waste.docx” open, and Save a “The Big Waste - d2.docx” file, but have the open file remain “The Big Waste.docx.” But, nooooo!
Unless I’m an idiot and the capability is hidden in there somewhere. (Note: Both conditions must obtain.)
Comment by Avram —
January 30, 2008 @ 12:42 am
This gives me an idea for an AppleScript.
Comment by joel hanes —
January 30, 2008 @ 12:56 am
It takes four commands, not one.
Let’s say you’re editing original_filename.doc:
Save
Save As frozen_draft.doc
Close
Open original_filename.doc
You can make it into a single command by creating a macro. See “creating a macro” in Word Help.
Comment by swio —
January 30, 2008 @ 6:15 am
I work on mainframes all day long. This functionality is available in ISPF, which has been the mainframe text editor for decades.
Comment by William Newman —
January 30, 2008 @ 8:43 am
For what it’s worth (recognizing it’s overkill for most of the people reading this)…
Programmers have developed a lot of technology for an industrial-strength version of this operation, which you might consider borrowing. (Not just programmers, really, but software-ish people in general: e.g., people doing tech documentation for any project, or doing artwork for computer games.) A “version control system” provides a save-a-draft operation, and afterwards supports all sorts of queries like “give me a copy of this file as it was on December 14th” or “what are the differences between the current version and the version as of yesterday morning.”
Version control systems are especially powerful for documents stored in human-readable text, such as computer program source code, or documents not in Word format but in something like SGML or HTML or LaTeX, or just un-marked-up bare ASCII. With such text, it’s easy to apply concepts like “what are the differences between versions” and to do things like “merge the changes produced by Alice, Bob, and Connie.” But even if you never want to look at the binary sludge that is the difference between two MSWord documents, just the ability to see a detailed history and extract copies any which way is very handy.
So, for the fraction of readers (1%? 15%?) who’ll spend a thousand or more hours over the next few years authoring documents with interesting revision histories, especially if the documents are fundamentally text not hand-fiddled layout (like a novel, not a CV or a restaurant menu) consider investing some tens of hours in an online tutorial or book, downloading or buying some version control system software, and letting your computer do more work for you. You shouldn’t expect as enormous a productivity advantage as from learning to use a word processor, but it does tend to be a clear win.
I use the free programs “cvs” (for old projects) and “git” (for new projects) under Linux and other Unix-ish systems. Several other programs also have a fair amount of mindshare on Linux. For Windows, I’m less sure: I know cvs and git run there, but for all I know quite different systems may have more mindshare there.
Comment by Mary Kay —
January 30, 2008 @ 10:28 am
It’s possible. My sister-in-law told us a story about how some years ago MS did a survey to find out what functions users would like to add to Word. Five of the top 10 were already there, but no one could find them…
MKK
Comment by Barry —
January 30, 2008 @ 11:22 am
I was using Word 2007 Monday evening. The f*cking menus were designed by Baphomet. Functions like ‘print’ are hidden; you’ve got to look for them. Formatting stuff was hidden.
Comment by Jim Henley —
January 30, 2008 @ 11:27 am
Barry, even on an un-personalized copy there’s a quick-print icon on the Quick Access Toolbar. Also, what formatting options were you looking for that aren’t on the Home tab, the default top tab when you open the program?
Comment by joel hanes —
January 30, 2008 @ 12:06 pm
The very first thing to do with any Microsoft product is to turn off personalized menus. This hideous misfeature actively prevents the beginning user from learning how to use the tool.
In Word 2003, this is done so:
Tools -> Customize -> Options -> Always Show Full Menus
In Windows XP itself:
Start -> Settings -> Taskbar and Start Menu :
check Classic Start menu
choose Customize
scroll to bottome of Advanced Start menu options
uncheck Use Personalized Menus
Comment by joel hanes —
January 30, 2008 @ 2:02 pm
For William Newman:
For pros like you, I can unreservedly recommend Perforce.
Free for one or two users and up to five checked-out client workspaces.
Supports Unix-alikes, Mac, and Windows.
Industrial strength; scales cleanly to many thousands of simultaneous users, many terabytes of data.
Supports atomic check-in of multiple modified files (the essential capability missing in CVS)
I have used SCCS, RCS, cvs, SourceSafe, and Perforce in my Unix and Windows based development, and Perforce is the only one I actually like.
Your mileage may vary. Some settling of contents may occur during shipping and handling.
Comment by Steve —
January 30, 2008 @ 2:17 pm
For Windows, I’m less sure: I know cvs and git run there, but for all I know quite different systems may have more mindshare there.
I’m fairly sure that git isn’t available in Windows, or at least that it wasn’t last year. (I’ve used cvs, svn, and the more recent mercurial aka hq; cvs and svn are older and tools are more universally available, while git and hq are more recent and have some underlying technical improvements largely of interest to programmers working in groups.)
If anyone knows of a plugin that makes Word support SVN directly, you’ll make my wife very happy.
Comment by Mike Kozlowski —
January 30, 2008 @ 7:20 pm
But version control isn’t what you want here. Or rather, it is, but you’d want to check in a version, switch over to your version control software, label the current version as a marked draft, then keep working in Word. Which isn’t really any more elegant than save as, close, open.
Anyway, this is the sort of functionality that’s ideal for a macro, but fuck if I know how to make a macro. It’s all weird and Visual Basicy.
Comment by The Modesto Kid —
January 31, 2008 @ 9:09 am
Sounds to me like, what you’re looking for is vi.
Comment by The Modesto Kid —
January 31, 2008 @ 9:09 am
(It has less WYSIWIGgity than Office though.)
Comment by Eric the .5b —
January 31, 2008 @ 7:57 pm
Ehn, it’s not quite so bad. I use SVN (aka Subversion) and TortoiseSVN, a Windows Explorer plugin. All I’d have to do would be save the file, right-click on the file in its folder and hit “commit”, type in a comment describing what change I’ve made (extremely useful when you’re looking back through changes months from now), then hit “OK”…And then hit “OK” again, but that’s typical…Now it’s backed up on a server elsewhere.
The problem is that even SVN is a bit fiddly to install in a networked environment (though I think it’s included in OS X), and the little context menu you get is rather programmer-oriented. It’s something that takes a little teaching.
Man, there is such a big potential market for a nice, intuitive, end-user-oriented version control system. Such a thing would install simply and make it utterly trivial to set up repositories and working directories (and perhaps call them better things). It would not only offer a more polished version of TortoiseSVN’s functionality, but also integrate with MS Office and other applications to make the little process I describe above involve nothing more than hitting a “Save Project” button in Word, typing the comment, and then hitting “OK”.
Really, it could probably be just a well-designed front end and set of application plug-ins on an existing base like SVN. For increased awesomeness, include an app that lets you look at the “before” and “after” versions of any common document format side-by-side for each and every commit, with changes color-coded ala the dual diff mini-app that’s included with TortoiseSVN (but only handles plain text).
Such a thing really would be one of those “How on Earth did we get along before this?” killer apps. I wish GUI programming were my area of expertise.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
January 31, 2008 @ 8:01 pm
(Or to put it another way, Jim’s problem really is a nail, but version control is a big, steam-powered hammer. We need version control that looks, feels, and acts like a nice tool from Office Depot.)
Comment by Miguel Madeira —
February 2, 2008 @ 7:18 am
Sub Save_as_Backup()
FileName = ActiveDocument.Name
ActiveDocument.SaveAs (”draft_” + FileName)
ActiveDocument.Close
Application.Documents.Open (FileName)
End Sub
Comment by Miguel Madeira —
February 2, 2008 @ 9:19 am
Or (perhaps better):
Sub Save_as_Backup()
FileName = ActiveDocument.Name
ActiveDocument.SaveAs (”draft_” + FileName)
ActiveDocument.SaveAs (FileName)
End Sub