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Jesus Saves. Microsoft, Not So Much....
Jan. 18th, 2023 08:04 amI almost stuck an addition on a post a couple days back about the client who, and I quote, promised me a vital document Friday, didn't email anything until yesterday afternoon, didn't attach the most vital part of it, promised an hour ago I'd get it "shortly" so I can work on that One Damn Thing in my office on a federal holiday and STILL hasn't sent it.
It finally rolled in at 4:36 that MLK afternoon, long after I'd abandoned any prospect of seeing it on the one day I'd set aside to work on it. Even that wasn't the end, for a revision showed up an hour later that I didn't see until first thing Tuesday morning. Fortunately, the rest of the day was relatively quiet, so after lunch I opened the attached spreadsheet he'd revised and sent me (this will be important later), and sat down to do my responsive work on it. No real brainpower required, just a cleanup of a 150-ish line, four-column spreadsheet that was initially generated by my bankruptcy software in something called CSV format.
You probably don't understand quite what that is, but don't worry: neither do I, really. I do know that it's a format which Microsoft Excel can open, read and turn into something I can use, edit, format and save in a prettier looking presentation.
Those four columns had to be turned into five and one of them then hidden.
Name And Address | Scheduled Amount | Filed Amount | Deferred Amount
All that came in the CSV conversion were the first two: "name and address" being a pretty jumbly scrape of data from a proprietary software's format, and "scheduled amount" being, duh, the amount my client scheduled them as being owed. I'd previously added the "filed amount" column for a small number of parties who filed papers with a different amount, and the "deferred amount" one for an even smaller number whose claims are to be paid only after the bulk of them get paid out. All I had on my plate today was to create a separate column for just "Address," and then, for each one, simply to select the address portion of the data and move it one column over. Once I finished doing that 150 times or so, that new column could then be hidden in the spreadsheet, the "name" column cleaned of any stray characters, and the whole thing formatted to make it look pretty on a single page or five (as it turned out).
This is pretty mindless work. If I had better computer skillz, I probably could have automated it. Instead, I just got into a rhythm- select, highlight, cut, tab over, paste, cleanup any stray commas or " marks at the beginning or end of a field. I even had a Slow Horses episode minimized in the bottom corner so I could do something cerebrally useful while doing this.
Most important? I saved my work. Over and over and over, I did. I wasn't going to let this bash of brainless work go to waste if Excel seized up or I made some other dumb mistake. Nope, this sucker was safer than a bar of gold in a Brinks truck. At last, I opened an email to send it, closed the saved file to be absolutely sure I was emailing the final final final version, attached it, opened it, and....
it looked like it looked at 9 this morning. Names and addresses, all jumbled up and jivey. The couple of duplicate entries I'd caught and corrected, back to uncorrected.
Fuckall, send me off to Slough House for this.
Almost instantly, I knew what the problem was. Remember that thing that would be important later? I opened the file directly from the attachment on the client's email. In earlier versions of Outlook (the email program I use for work), this was much harder to do if you could even do it at all; you had to save the file attachment someplace and THEN you could play with it. Now, though, they're from Microsoft and they're here to help you! You can now click on that attachment and it will open (albeit in "protected view"), and if you allow it, you can edit it, print it and hit the save button a gagillion times!
But where does it save it TO, Mr. Spock? ::gestures wildly::
Good question.
I fiddled, checked some logical places where I might have been doing all that saving to. Went into OneDrive online to see if "version history" would save me as it has many times in the past. Nope, nope and nope. I resigned myself to just doing the exercise all over again when I got home. Sat down, and before beginning that rite of penance, I tried one more trick.
----
Microsoft, bless its stone cold little heart, stores temporary files in a different place than either the default folder for various documents or the default folder where theOffice 365 programs such as Excel make their home. They're on your c: drive in a folder called Users, which then has subfolders for each, wait for it, USER. There's one with my name, one called Default, and one called Public. Within each are sub-subfolders called Local, LocalLow and Roaming. Each of those then has a ton of sub-sub-subfolders, any of which could be holding these crown jewels of my beautiful work.
I didn't know which one it might have been dumped into. Nor did I care. I simply pointed File Explorer at the tippy top level of "App Data," and asked it to search the magic letters "CSV." (Remember CSV? There's a file format about CSV.) It had to think about it. The Northeast Power Grid might have briefly ground to a halt while the massive computing power of this laptop gave all to this sacred quest. I went down the hall for a snack. When I returned, there were maybe a half dozen files waiting for my inspection with the CSV abbreviation in the title. But now, it was easy- because that list also displayed the times the files were saved, and I knew just about when, not quite an hour earlier, I'd done my last save on that file. One click and,....
and,...
It was there. Just like I'd saved it. It's now double-triple-quadruple saved to the client's own special place in the ether, and emailed to the client, AND backed up to an external drive, all old-schooly.
So the moral of this story is,.... if some Fundie shows up at your door and asks you if you've agreed to let Jesus save your immortal soul, don't ask them Why?
Ask them Where.
It finally rolled in at 4:36 that MLK afternoon, long after I'd abandoned any prospect of seeing it on the one day I'd set aside to work on it. Even that wasn't the end, for a revision showed up an hour later that I didn't see until first thing Tuesday morning. Fortunately, the rest of the day was relatively quiet, so after lunch I opened the attached spreadsheet he'd revised and sent me (this will be important later), and sat down to do my responsive work on it. No real brainpower required, just a cleanup of a 150-ish line, four-column spreadsheet that was initially generated by my bankruptcy software in something called CSV format.
You probably don't understand quite what that is, but don't worry: neither do I, really. I do know that it's a format which Microsoft Excel can open, read and turn into something I can use, edit, format and save in a prettier looking presentation.
Those four columns had to be turned into five and one of them then hidden.
Name And Address | Scheduled Amount | Filed Amount | Deferred Amount
All that came in the CSV conversion were the first two: "name and address" being a pretty jumbly scrape of data from a proprietary software's format, and "scheduled amount" being, duh, the amount my client scheduled them as being owed. I'd previously added the "filed amount" column for a small number of parties who filed papers with a different amount, and the "deferred amount" one for an even smaller number whose claims are to be paid only after the bulk of them get paid out. All I had on my plate today was to create a separate column for just "Address," and then, for each one, simply to select the address portion of the data and move it one column over. Once I finished doing that 150 times or so, that new column could then be hidden in the spreadsheet, the "name" column cleaned of any stray characters, and the whole thing formatted to make it look pretty on a single page or five (as it turned out).
This is pretty mindless work. If I had better computer skillz, I probably could have automated it. Instead, I just got into a rhythm- select, highlight, cut, tab over, paste, cleanup any stray commas or " marks at the beginning or end of a field. I even had a Slow Horses episode minimized in the bottom corner so I could do something cerebrally useful while doing this.
Most important? I saved my work. Over and over and over, I did. I wasn't going to let this bash of brainless work go to waste if Excel seized up or I made some other dumb mistake. Nope, this sucker was safer than a bar of gold in a Brinks truck. At last, I opened an email to send it, closed the saved file to be absolutely sure I was emailing the final final final version, attached it, opened it, and....
it looked like it looked at 9 this morning. Names and addresses, all jumbled up and jivey. The couple of duplicate entries I'd caught and corrected, back to uncorrected.
Fuckall, send me off to Slough House for this.
Almost instantly, I knew what the problem was. Remember that thing that would be important later? I opened the file directly from the attachment on the client's email. In earlier versions of Outlook (the email program I use for work), this was much harder to do if you could even do it at all; you had to save the file attachment someplace and THEN you could play with it. Now, though, they're from Microsoft and they're here to help you! You can now click on that attachment and it will open (albeit in "protected view"), and if you allow it, you can edit it, print it and hit the save button a gagillion times!
But where does it save it TO, Mr. Spock? ::gestures wildly::
Good question.
I fiddled, checked some logical places where I might have been doing all that saving to. Went into OneDrive online to see if "version history" would save me as it has many times in the past. Nope, nope and nope. I resigned myself to just doing the exercise all over again when I got home. Sat down, and before beginning that rite of penance, I tried one more trick.
----
Microsoft, bless its stone cold little heart, stores temporary files in a different place than either the default folder for various documents or the default folder where the
I didn't know which one it might have been dumped into. Nor did I care. I simply pointed File Explorer at the tippy top level of "App Data," and asked it to search the magic letters "CSV." (Remember CSV? There's a file format about CSV.) It had to think about it. The Northeast Power Grid might have briefly ground to a halt while the massive computing power of this laptop gave all to this sacred quest. I went down the hall for a snack. When I returned, there were maybe a half dozen files waiting for my inspection with the CSV abbreviation in the title. But now, it was easy- because that list also displayed the times the files were saved, and I knew just about when, not quite an hour earlier, I'd done my last save on that file. One click and,....
and,...
It was there. Just like I'd saved it. It's now double-triple-quadruple saved to the client's own special place in the ether, and emailed to the client, AND backed up to an external drive, all old-schooly.
So the moral of this story is,.... if some Fundie shows up at your door and asks you if you've agreed to let Jesus save your immortal soul, don't ask them Why?
Ask them Where.