July 25th, 2006

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Technology
11 Comments »

An Idea for MS Office 2019

Here’s the use case: I create a Word document called Foobar_Magic_Business_Plan_v1.doc and email it to somebody. They make some changes, and email it back to me as Foobar_Magic_Business_Plan_v2.doc. I open the document straight out of the email message, make a few more changes, and want to save it.

When I click Save As, I’m inevitably presented with a default folder location like this:

C:\Documents and Settings\Darren\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLK1F

That, as you might expect, isn’t remotely where I want to save the darned thing. Instead, I have to navigate up five levels, back down three levels and save it where I want.

Wouldn’t it be great if MS Word actually paid attention to the file name and content of the document, and suggested where I should put the file. After all, I’ve already saved an earlier version in a folder named something like:

C:\Capulet\Clients\FoobarMagic\Business Plans\

It’s reasonable to expect a computer to conclude that, hey, I might want to store this similarly-named file in there. Of course, you could turn on and off this feature as you see fit.

Call it Predictive File Management, or some such thing. Could somebody from the MS office team get on that?

Comments: 11 Responses so far

Andrea Coutu
July 25th, 2006
6:53 pm

Yeah, but so many people call their files “Darren” and save stuff in one big “Darren” directory.

So to speak.

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Michael Buckbee
July 25th, 2006
8:22 pm

It wouldn’t even need to be that complicated. If it would just default to saving in the “My Documents” folder (where Word normally defaults to) it would be an improvement.

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Matt Teichrob
July 25th, 2006
8:33 pm

Amen to that!! You have no idea how many people in our organization have lost work due to this nasty little problem…

Is there a petition? Where do I sign?

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Pooya
July 25th, 2006
9:33 pm

Well, Microsoft was long working on WinFS, which was a combination of DataBase and FileSystem. That way instead of guessing what the file is and where should it be saved you could have just saved that no matter where. And then you have searched for that file based on keywords, criterias, etc. This way you could have one file in both documents folder/keyword and business folder/keyword. But the project, which was said will be Vista, was scraped completely. Nowadays desktop search utils kind of do that.

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Mark
July 26th, 2006
2:52 am

I think Darren you are looking for something like Spotlight on the OSX 10.4. That searches for the file as you type in the name and indexes the harddrive as you save documents.

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Todd
July 26th, 2006
4:24 am

Yes to Spotlight; folders are dead. And I think that MS would be happy to incorporate your request when they ship Vista in December, 2035.

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Dan
July 26th, 2006
8:22 am

In most any version of MS Word, click: Tools, Options, File Locations, highlight Documents, and click the Modify button.

Change to what you want the new permanent default path to be, click OK twice.

As with all MS Office things, this is per account, per machine.

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Dan
July 26th, 2006
8:25 am

Oh yeah, there’s a section for Workgroup Templates in there as well, everyone in a department should have this set to their departmental shares.

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Andy K
July 26th, 2006
11:00 am

I’ve had similar frustrations, like opening a file from somewhere and always defaulting to save it in MyDocuments or the last place I saved a file. Actually, that is not MS-Office because I don’t use it, but so many other editors and programs have this problem.

The save mechanism should have some intelligence, such as parsing the list of recent documents. Or the save dialog could make a list of recently used directories available with a single click. Or instead of having the default path in the program, why not store it in the doc (wouldn’t work for your email recipient, though).

Maybe someone at openoffice.org is reading–but you should send it to them too. I have this dream that all these open source projects are open to suggestions, but I never see a Submit Suggestion button on their website. They must assume we are all going to download the source, write our own code, compile it and submit it back.

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Neal
July 26th, 2006
1:37 pm

This happens because file systems and file identification (paths) are primitive and not integrated with the internet or even with the LAN very well. The office people are waiting for the OS people to fix it (WinFS or something), but it’s a huge can of worms and so the OS people punt.

Still, there are plenty of kludges the MS Office developers could use to ease the pain somewhat. And since MSWord is just a whole huge pile of kludge, layers on layers built up over the decades, I surprised they haven’t “fixed” this yet.

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Jeff
July 26th, 2006
7:58 pm

If someone emails me something, then it’s in my Gmail and only a (blindingly fast) search a way.

By 2019, (More like 2009 probably) all our files will be up in the cloud if we want them, and we won’t have to care about the hard disk as much.

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