Not all my Google Docs transferred well from v1 of the Google Docs editor to the current version. One document with an unusually long table was particularly problematic. Google's cursor tracking was off, and even small edits create ugly formatting artifacts.
I tried exporting to Word, the editing in Word and reimporting, but the results were messy -- though at least editing worked again.
I had more luck with Nisus Writer Pro. I exported as RTF, opened in NWP, saved as RTF and reimported to Google Docs. Then I used a menu command to translate it to GD native format. Seems fine now.
PS. Unrelated quirk -- when I reimported it didn't become associated with Google Drive. I had to search to bring up the new version, then drag to Google Drive to have it show in the Google Drive menu. Google Docs need a bit of usability work
I suspect there are at least as many gems in the rest of the very well done manual. I wonder if anyone else has ever read it (excepting book authors).
[1] http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/iphone_user_guide.pdf I read the iBook version.
[2] Siri can't understand Emily's last name, but 'my wife' she gets. If I say "my son" I get a list of all my children (sons and daughter) and it's easy to select one. If I say "friend" then Siri scopes the search to friends in my contact. These tricks help when you have large numbers of contacts (ex > 1,0000).
I don't think this is a common problem, but unanswered questions found in my failed Windows 7 searches suggest it's not rare.
I ran into the problem after my corporate laptop died. This happens fairly frequently, I suspect the encryption software we use great increases the risk of unrecoverable errors resulting in effective drive failure.
Since I was traveling I knew I'd lost a bit of work, but fortunately my notes were still on paper and I run my own automated office backups [1] using Retrospect Professional (Retrospect Windows now). I was a bit nervous though, because I consider backup to be an unsolved problem. Even though I do a test restore to my system every few weeks I still don't trust my backups.
Despite my worries the restore went well. In an hour or two I had 30 GB of Windows 7 data I could access from a workstation while I waited for my laptop repair.
Except ... I couldn't see my User Folder (ex: User/jgordon). I could see other folders, but not my User Folder (where most of my data was).
I knew my files were there, something was taking up 30GB of storage. Retrospect could see the files, Windows 7 couldn't. (Later I showed that XP could see them too.)
Hilarity ensued. I'll spare you the details of the fixes we tried including icalcs resets, updating access privileges for all children of the visible container folder, escalated privilege command.com and so on.
The trick was a setting in "Folder Options" that's been around for over a decade, but whose meaning changed @ Windows 7 (Vista). In Folder Options find and and uncheck the "hide protected operating system files" option. Suddenly everything appeared.
Why was this so hard for us to figure out? There were several contributing factors:
Like I said, backup is an unsolved problem. [2]
See also
[1] There's no officially supported way to backup a large personal drive where I work. This is more common in large corporations than civilians could imagine; I have far more robust backup at home than at work.
[2] To solve it vendors would need to design the OS to facilitate backup and restores. Apple did this to some extent with iOS.
For several years I've used a Time Capsule drive to share slide show images for our home machines and to quickly pass files between users and machines. The lack of permission enforcement is a feature, not a bug. [1] (I believe the AirPort Extreme can do this as well.)
For much of this time I did not secure the shared disks, I just enabled Read/Write Guest access. This seemed to work, but it was unreliable. OS X seemed to drop the connection and it took some time to reestablish it with a connection dialog that defaulted to username/password. I had to switch to guest.
This has gotten worse recently, perhaps because my Time Capsule WiFi is dying [2]. On a hunch I enabled "secure shared disks" and simply set a disk password:
I then connected from every machine and saved the password in the key chain. I left Guest as a read-only option.
Since doing that I think connections are much faster, and drops are much less frequent. I think sometimes OS X restores a dropped connection, whereas before it couldn't.
Wish I'd made that change years ago.
[1] It's rather hard to find out what operating system Apple uses with its Time Capsule and Extreme. I've read that at one time they used Wind River VxWorks, later NetBSD.
[2] Apple WiFi devices last longer than most, but even they seem to die after 3 years or so. I don't know why; I assume they die of overheating.
Our family uses a (free) Google Apps domain to manage our email, calendars, contacts, documents and so on.
For years we've used Google's little known m.google.com configuration to sync multiple calendars to each device (English only). So we all see the Family Calendar, we see our own calendars, I see Emily's calendar, etc. Including various sports teams and organizations we often interact with 10-25 calendars.
It works surprisingly well; certainly better than iCloud/iCal. Except for one really annoying limitation -- color assignment is absurd. I run into color collisions pretty often and I can't fix the OS assigned colors.
I've complained about the problem quite often. I figured there was no chance of a fix.
Wrong.
Today I had to reconfigure my son's phone after unlocking it, and I noticed something weird. There's an Edit button and it lets me assign colors to individual Google Calendars.
Click Edit, and I get a screen where I can assign colors.
Ooookaaayy, so I'm demented. I knew that. But I have a screen shot from 7/2011 and there's no Edit button there:
So when did the Edit button appear? I'm on iOS 5, not iOS 6.
Well, once I realized what had changed, I learned it came with iOS 5 last October. One friggin' year ago: "Another new option allows you to change the pastel colors of your calendar(s); you can’t pick colors willy-nilly, but you may choose among seven lovely hues."
I knew the calendar had changed; I'd spotted the week view on my own and I knew of the other changes. I just didn't notice the calendar creation/color option (you can't add calendars for Google ActiveSync, but you can for Exchange sync).
So Apple quietly fixed one of my multi-year complaints about iOS. Too quietly.
Am I the only guy that totally missed this? What else have I missed? How come nobody was shouting this fix from the rooftops?
See also:
On the Day of the Dapocalypse Google ended Google Reader Share, though my old shares are still accessible almost a year later.
Google left a hole in the net that hasn't been filled yet (alas, hivemined).
Something's emerging to fill that space. It's not Google Reader Share; but you can still see the shape emerging.
Today I'm using Pinboard, alpha.app.net, IFTTT and buffer.
IFTTT is the glue that ties things together. Buffer and Pinboard are the note capture mechanisms. Buffer has more style, but Pinboard has the essential structure (title, link, comment) and it's willing to accept cash. App.net is the wild card; a rapidly evolving set of services that may be the foundation for future solutions (see app.net #googlereadershare)
I still miss GoogleReaderShare, but I'm curious to see what will come next.
See also:
