The Word is up: time to abandon old working habits
IN MY DEFENCE, I was tired, hungry and grumpy as I typed the message. “What on earth have you used that version for?” The keyboard bounced around my desk as I expressed my frustration through forceful fingertips. “That was last month’s document!!”
The annoyance expressed by those two exclamation marks was clearly mirrored by Paul’s response. “No,” typed PC Pro’s art director, the “you idiot” he wanted to express being silent. “Look. Here’s the doc.” A screenshot swiftly followed, which did indeed show the old words, despite the document having the right month’s name.
I uttered a few words that can’t be expressed in a family-friendly magazine such as this. I opened the Word document on Google Drive and all seemed fine. I was about to point out that he must be looking in the wrong folder when he sent me a screenshot of the directory as well.
I took a deep breath. Clearly one of us was wrong and clearly it wasn’t me. Ergo it must be him. Heck, I even knew Latin. I started to type a response to that effect when I remembered something: we were using technology! And I was assuming that the technology was working as it should, which is Rookie Mistake Number One.
I shan’t bore you with the details, but it turns out this is a weird, unpredictable problem that stems from saving an old Word file as a new one, and Drive getting confused before deciding to revert to the original’s contents. (Okay, I lied when I said I wouldn’t bore you with the details.) 97% of the time it works fine; it’s those 3% that are the killer.
So why not shift to a different system? I could use SugarSync, for example, which is one of the cloud backup services in our cloud backup group test this month ( see
p76). Or Dropbox. Or OneDrive. Or – you get the picture.
The trouble is, as Phil Collins lamented, I’m in too deep.
PC Pro’s IT infrastructure, once built upon Exchange, Office and other Microsoft technologies, is now powered by a myriad of different tools: Slack for day-to-day comms, Skype for the podcast, Microsoft Office, LibreOffice for those who won’t pay for a word processor… the list goes on.
But tool number one, the sun around which all other planets revolve, is Google. It’s home to the office email and, crucially, our virtual document server. To shift elsewhere would mean either entirely extricating ourselves from Google or paying yet more cash to another supplier, along with the pain of changing systems and losing our hardearned knowledge. Better to make do with the devil we both know and already pay for.
That means workarounds. I now use a belt-and-braces approach of sending Paul Word docs via Slack, along with the doc itself in his “in tray” on Google Drive. Arguably, I should shift to Google Docs, but I didn’t spend 20 years getting to know Office inside and out for nothing. Did I?
Perhaps it’s time. I’m typing this in Word, on my Windows 10 Dell XPS 13, but if I were being rational then I’d switch to the HP Chromebook 13 reviewed on p54. I now pay for Office 365 myself rather than the IT department, and – as we reveal in our Brexit-inspired feature on p46 – prices are only going up. When G Suite costs $3 per user per month, and comes with all of the storage I need, I’m effectively paying Microsoft out of laziness and familiarity. As Paul silently says many times a day, what an idiot.