Typing disaster: not my fault for a change
Well now, today I was going to continue with my blog posts talking about how to get from Rhodes to Symi. I wrote two pieces on one page and was half way through checking the spelling when two odd and very annoying things happened.
One: My typos were underlined in red, as usual, to show me where my mind had gone faster than my fingers, and where I needed to go back and change them. I right-clicked on one and made the change. I right clicked on the next, and the red underline vanished, and it looked like the word was written correctly. It wasn’t. I changed it manually. But this kept happening, and now, at random, Word gets rid of the underline and spell check/change options when I right click on an underlined word, and I have to look very closely to see what is wrong with the word. The next underlined word worked fine, but the one after that didn’t. Odd, I thought. I am all signed up, and everything is up to date, it’s a genuine Word package I am using, a new keyboard (about two weeks old) and the batteries in both mouse and keyboard are also new and fine everywhere else. Just one of those things, I thought, it will be back to normal when I next restart. (It wasn’t.) So, let’s press on.
Two: Once the spell checking was done, I ran the piece through a grammar check programme, and that was all going according to plan, as usual, when suddenly it was as if someone was holding down my delete key. The cursor started eating up all following words, and there was nothing I could do. I clicked on everything. No good; ‘word was not responding’. I checked the delete key, but it was not stuck down. All I could do was look on helplessly as my text, about 1,300 words, was swallowed up into the flashing cursor. Knowing that my auto-save is turned on to every five minutes, I thought, ‘I’ll close the programme down (with Ctrl + Alt + Del, the only way I could stop this word carnage) and start again from five minutes ago, which was when I started spell checking. I’d only have to spell check again; not a huge issue. But no…
I re-opened Word expecting to find the auto recovery option of the interrupted file, or whatever that handy thing is called, but it did not appear. I checked online in various places to find out how to manually recover auto-saved documents. I did as I was told and… No. The only files in that list were from yesterday. I researched further and found some other things to try but to no avail. In the end, I resorted to posting in the official forums for Microsoft and the other programme I was using, and I am waiting to hear if there are any fixes. But what this disaster has done (apart from making me distrust Word and its auto-save, and making me vow to always save even the shortest of blog posts to a file before I start writing them) was to take the edge off what I was going to write about today.
So, as long as I am over it, tomorrow I will start again and write something more helpful and more ‘Symi’. I just wanted to get this off my chest, so I don’t go mad. You never know, I may hear back from one of the forums with a fix, or at least an explanation. Meanwhile, I’ll investigate one of those file recovery programmes and see if that locates the hours’ worth of work that I have lost, which should have been auto-saved, but wasn’t. I’ll try and be in a better mood tomorrow.
