- Jun 24, 2001
- 24,195
- 857
- 126
A coworker left his document open and unsaved asking me how to get the right edge of a table back inside the margins of the document (it was somehow pushed way off to the right). I had no idea it was unsaved. I rigured he left it open for me to fix his table issue, which is what he asked. I know that I can change views to find the edge and drag it back, which I did rather quickly, but I wanted to see just how he got it that way, especially due to numerous other strange formatting changes he had made.
I began holding CTRL+Z until I saw his other major formatting changes undo and then started stepping forward through a day's worth of document edits using CTRL+Y (Redo). I stopped at one point of interest and reached for the mouse, which was so close to the KB that putting my hand on it typed the plus sign from the number pad and eliminated my list of forward "Redo" changes in the Undo/Redo timeline. This was before I got to the part I was looking for, so it wiped that out too. Oh well. I wasn't THAT interested. The document had only about half of the day's information in it at that point. I decided that I would close the document, ignore changes, revert back to the last saved copy, fix the table edges again, and save. Unfortunately, he had not saved once in his entire shift and so following that plan resulted in a file with only the first line of the day typed in it.
It's not the end of the world because nothing really important happened to put in the document on that particular shift, but I'm still curious to know if there's a way to not only undo a change, but go back to the previous "branch" of changes. I can see that it would be very useful anytime you step far back through a list of changes, so that you do not lose that data. The list of changes for undo/redo doesn't exactly save with the document, so that may be info you want to keep but have no way to save and using the feature, as I was, would alway put your forward/redo buffer at risk of loss/deletion from pretty much any stray keystroke.
"You wanna go back for informational purposes? Beware! Things are so delicate that any single key could irrecovably wipe out what you are looking for!" This just doesn't sound right. Considering the feature bloat of Word, there has to be some kind of feature to go back to the previous "branch" of change history to accomodate a single errant keystroke.
In the future, I'm going to be saving this guy's docs under an alternate filename before I touch anything just in case he didn't save.
I began holding CTRL+Z until I saw his other major formatting changes undo and then started stepping forward through a day's worth of document edits using CTRL+Y (Redo). I stopped at one point of interest and reached for the mouse, which was so close to the KB that putting my hand on it typed the plus sign from the number pad and eliminated my list of forward "Redo" changes in the Undo/Redo timeline. This was before I got to the part I was looking for, so it wiped that out too. Oh well. I wasn't THAT interested. The document had only about half of the day's information in it at that point. I decided that I would close the document, ignore changes, revert back to the last saved copy, fix the table edges again, and save. Unfortunately, he had not saved once in his entire shift and so following that plan resulted in a file with only the first line of the day typed in it.
It's not the end of the world because nothing really important happened to put in the document on that particular shift, but I'm still curious to know if there's a way to not only undo a change, but go back to the previous "branch" of changes. I can see that it would be very useful anytime you step far back through a list of changes, so that you do not lose that data. The list of changes for undo/redo doesn't exactly save with the document, so that may be info you want to keep but have no way to save and using the feature, as I was, would alway put your forward/redo buffer at risk of loss/deletion from pretty much any stray keystroke.
"You wanna go back for informational purposes? Beware! Things are so delicate that any single key could irrecovably wipe out what you are looking for!" This just doesn't sound right. Considering the feature bloat of Word, there has to be some kind of feature to go back to the previous "branch" of change history to accomodate a single errant keystroke.
In the future, I'm going to be saving this guy's docs under an alternate filename before I touch anything just in case he didn't save.
Facebook
Twitter