SO, if you read my last blog, I think I was talking about this research paper that I had to write for my 301 class. Yes, I spoke in past tense, it is done. I am Sooooo happy that I finally got it done. After a lot of headache and crying!
Long story: Back in December, we bought a new computer. Yeah! We love it. Well, we didn't have Microsoft Office on it yet, so whenever anyone would send me a Word document, I couldn't open it. So, I downloaded Word Viewer off of the internet. This allowed me to read Word documents without actually owning the software. Well, later, Momma Pam let us download the Microsoft Office 2007 onto our computer. (By-the-way, 2007 is so much better than 2003 and if you don't have it, I would suggest that you seriously consider getting it. I could never go back to the old version. Bleh!) Anyway, I never uninstalled the Word Viewer because I didn't want to accidentally uninstall the actual Word 2007. So, everytime I receive an email, I open it up and it first downloads onto Word Viewer but there is a button that allows you to open it for editing and it switches it to the 2007 format.
Well, this is where all of the crying came in with my term paper. I have a habit of emailing myself different edits of my papers so that I can work on them at school and at home. On Tuesday night, the night before my paper was due, I opened up my term paper file from my email and it came up through Word Viewer and than I opened it for editing in 2007. No big deal, right? Well, I worked on it for a few hours and I got done with it at 10:15. I was so happy that I was done pretty early and didn't have to stay up all night trying to complete it. I saved it and was going to go to bed but one of my files wouldn't print so Sterling suggested I shut down all of my files that were open because the computer was probably just to overloaded. So, save save save, I shut down every file. Restarted my chart file and it printed. Yeah! So, I was about to head off to bed when I thought, maybe I'll look over what I had written. I go to pull up the file and it is not there! What? I couldn't believe it. I am a habitual saver on my computer. Save save save. Every five mintues. What? Where could it have gone? Well, I started crying and STerling's like, What's the matter? I just ran into the other room and balled my eyes out because i knew it was gone for good. Sterling searched for an hour, by that time it was 11:30. I told him I just needed to re-write the whole second half of my paper and look for my sources again and recreate my bibliography.
Oh, the frustration! My paper had been 24 pages long! And I only had 13 from an old file! Ugh!
Well, we figured out what had happened. Apparently when something is opened up from Word Viewer, it doesn't save it. Even if you push the save button. NOoooo! Remember, I save save save every five minutes. Noooooo! I couldn't believe it. We tested it with a few files and it never saved them, even when you open them for editing in Word 2007. Wow, we couldn't believe it.
Well, thankfully, I had done my bibliogrpahy on easybib.com and all of my sources had been saved on there. (Really awesome website if you have to make a bibliography. You just enter in the website address and it autocite's it for you!)
I re-wrote my paper and it only took me about 2 hours. I went to bed around 2 and in the morning, I got up and finished a few things and Sterling helped edit it. Sigh... I ended up having a 26 page paper. 1 page for cover, 1 page table of contents, 18 pages of text, 3 pages of bibliogaphy, 3 pages of appendix. Hopefully that is the last research paper I will ever have to write in school. By the way, I am really good at writing 5 page papers now. They are so easy. 18 pages, only took me a week. Hopefully I get a good grade on it.
So, the moral of the story is, never download Word Viewer.
It's been a long week.
1 comment:
I'll keep that in mind :) Thanks.
What kind of kitty did you get? Can't wait to see it on the blog.
Post a Comment