Sunday 21 October 2007

Slow news... no news

The problem with being stuck in bed is that it severely limits your life experience! My interaction with the world has been limited to Rich, my nearly-mother-in-law and the cat... oh and of course my mobile phone and the internet... what would I do without technology?!

I was alarmed to find out whilst watching BBC's "Have I Got News For You" last night that there is a plague of 'killer' ladybirds infesting the country... and even more alarmed after doing a bit of reading on the internet to discover that some of the bugs recently spotted in our garden are in fact these interlopers! What I thought was a young ladybug with not fully developed colours in unusual black with red spots is in fact an invader from the Far East!

My laptop and I are now very well acquainted having spent so much time in each other's company... I managed a personal best of around 9 hours uninterrupted computer time yesterday!!! I had an extremely long and involved 'discussion' with the Microsoft website whilst I tried to download an add-in for Office 2007. Here's the trauma of incompatible computer systems! At work we run Windows XP and Office 2003. At home we run Windows Vista and Office 2007. For reasons best known to themselves Microsoft decided to make entire new file formats for Office 2007 and the .doc and .xls formats have been replaced with .docx and .xlsx. This is generally fine as you can choose 'save as' and use the old file formats... however there are some parts of the new improved Office which can't be 'backwards' saved!!! Here's what happened. I had a document I had done in the office. It was a Microsoft Publisher document. The only programme that can open Publisher documents is Publisher. However... most of the content came from emails and other files... and what didn't could be extracted as text from a PDF of the Publisher document. I then spent hours putting the document back together in Word. However... when I tried to save as a 2003 file type it couldn't be done as the formatting wasn't compatible. The file was therefore only available to open with Word 2007... which we don't have at work... so the file can't go back to work. I didn't have a programme to make it into ANY file type that could be opened at work... until I eventually persuaded Microsoft's website to let me download the add-in. It didn't like Firefox... it didn't want to go through the 'verify my Office' process... the first download didn't work... there were no instructions on how to use the add-in when it did download... what a rigmarole. Anyway, at last. Shiny new PDF... sent back to the office!!!