I remember a time when software came in a great big box
and in the box was a manual. Not that
people read them. When a problem arose –
as problems did and do – you would call “the expert,” a friend or relative who
was supposed to know how to fix everything, and you would ask what to do.
“I changed directories to ‘C:’, and wanted to get rid
of unnecessary files – How can one person fill up two megabytes? – so I typed ‘DEL
*.*’ and now I am having problems.”
Meanwhile the manual sat glowering on a shelf, unread.
Eventually I developed a fondness for manuals, one in
particular. I spent several months in
Bangkok working on a project that required a thorough knowledge of Microsoft
Access. When I began about all I knew
was how to spell “access,” but I packed a manual for Access 2003. It was a lot of fun! Ta would do data entry
in the bedroom, while I would sit in the living room writing queries, and ignoring
the wrestling matches Sasi’s babysitter spent fourteen hours a day watching.
Around three in the afternoon I would be ready to throw the computer through
the window, where it would plummet fourteen stories and take out one of the
noodle vendors on Soi 11. Instead, I would throw on my swim trunks, grab the
manual, and after a workout and a swim, dry in the sun reading all about union
queries.
Today you buy a software package in the same great big
box, but that box is light as a feather, because inside is a CD and no manual
at all. Some packages have a PDF version
of the manual on the CD. There may be
one on the web. Many times I hied myself
to Funan, which had a bookstore that sold nothing but manuals, the complete
works of the Dummies folks, O’Reilly, WROX, SAMS … Closed, unfortunately, like
many bookstores before them. The only
outfit that still sends manuals is Stata, and they don’t send one, they send
stacks! My set takes up half a shelf.
When I have a question, do I pull down the appropriate
volume and look up how to reshape data from long to wide, or what nifty graphic
features can be accessed through the GUI?
(Stata users typically do it all through the command line.) Sometimes.
But I have learned, and here is one of the most valuable tips I can
offer:
Whatever problem you are facing, someone else has already run across it,
and sought help online.
There is no problem so complex or obscure that you
cannot find help on the web. Date conversion
functions in Stata? Foreign currency
transactions in MYOB? The syntax for
querying tables in multiple databases in SQL?
Type conversion errors in VB? (Those are probably SQL issues in disguise.)
Those are all bread and butter problems, but aren’t
those the ones that come up most often?
The problems you face are the things you think you ought to know, but
somehow … you do not.
I did once discover a bug in MS Word, an honest-to-god
stumper. When I was writing my first
book I had many problems with tables. I
had tables that stretched to the absolute limits of what could fit on a page,
and even “the expert” couldn’t help. I had to work with a senior tech support
guy at Microsoft. (It used to be
possible, after undergoing a few hours of torture, to speak with someone who
qualified as “senior tech support.” Good luck with that today!) The bug wasn’t in the tables, though, it was
in the pagination. Because the tables
were so large they could only appear in landscape view, not portrait. Picture what happens to the page number if
the view rotates 90 degrees. If that
weren’t enough, there was the aforementioned bug.
Part of the solution to the above required paginating
in the footer, rather than not in the footer.
The end product was going to be an actual printed book, so the page
numbers had to alternate sides, so they would always appear on the outside edge
of the page. And because of the tables I
had to break the book up into a half dozen sections, and turn the page numbers
on and off, and restart the numbers not at “1,” but wherever they should pick
up. (And in the introduction I used Roman
instead of Arabic numerals: I, ii, iii …)
Anyway, the page numbers in the new sections refused to alternate.
I called MS and after an hour had worked my way
through to a senior techie. We spent
another hour doing all the things I had already tried on the advice of “the
expert,” before calling MS. Finally, we
had tried everything, every arrow in his quiver, and with a “ta da!” in his
voice he proclaimed: “There, now it works.”
“No, it still isn’t working.”
And, swear to god, he shouted at me: “Why is it doing
that!?”
Um, if I knew that, why would I call you?
But while we were talking, I selected the page number
in the footer and tried dragging it outside the footer. Did you know you can drag the page
number? You can. But you can’t drag it outside the footer area,
it snaps back in before you get very far.
However, that solved the problem.
Whatever invisible gremlin was clutching my page numbers, when you drag
it outside the magic square of the footer box, it drops dead. I reported this to the senior tech, who
without missing a beat took credit!
I was inspired to write this today because of
pagination in MS Word. You might imagine
that after going through all of that seventeen years ago I would have the last
word on Word, especially pagination. You
imagine wrong! Yesterday I was preparing
a story for submission and ran into a problem.
This time, I found the answer in one minute of web searching, a YouTube
clip that addressed precisely the problem I was having. I had to watch it three times, as one command
was so small (I didn’t think I would need to go full screen) I had trouble
reading it the first two times. I noted
that at least one comment below the clip read: “You saved me from throwing my
PC out the window!” (Another noodle
vendor owes his life to timely technical support!)
Here is today’s challenge. The submission guidelines called for the
story title on the upper left of every page, and the page number on the upper
right. You could cheat and type them in
by hand, I suppose. (It also called for
the word count on the upper right of the first page, and that is how I inserted
that.) But the preferred method is to
create a header, and put in the title at upper left, and page number at upper right,
and let Word take care of the rest of the document. That is what the header is for, after all.
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