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It's really crazy. I wrote an article the other night about submitting articles to free magazines and I can't find it. I've been having a lot of trouble with my computer lately. I'm hoping I saved it on my laptop which is trouble free...so far.

My troubles started with Microsoft Outlook. From the beginning if I tried to use it my computer hung and I had to reboot. Then my computer ate my Excel program - it literally just disappeared. After that MS Word started losing my files or saved them corrupted. I lost a 1200 word ms and several other research documents that I worked on for hours and hours and hours.

Thinking it might be the computer, I went out and got two zip drives. When working on my regular computer I only saved to the zip drive. Not wanting to lose any more files I did a backup of the zip I used (Zip A) to the second zip (B). Thank goodness, because I accidentally hit zip A while it was in my laptop and it broke. Talk about Murphy's Law.

I also thought maybe something happened to the Microsoft program so I had my husband delete it from my computer and he downloaded Open Office for me. I still had problems with files becoming corrupt or disappearing. Then, I lost Works Spreadsheet program - just disappeared. Is it Gremlins?

So, now I only use my regular computer for things I don't have to save. I also got a third zip drive (C) that I used to backup zip B. In addition to this, I'm going to get two more zips. One to backup (C) and another to keep just in case.

What's the moral to the story? Make sure you always back up your work! And, in cases like mine, backup your backup.

Karen

I teach a bunch of little “Getting Started with X” night classes at the local vocational high school. They’re fun. I’ve been doing them for years now. They’re the sort of classes you’d teach at a library if you had a computer lab, but the libraries here don’t have computer labs. They’re usually 8-12 hours broken down into two hour classes. Given that, you might be surprised how little we cover, but we go slow, do a LOT of review, and do a lot of things together so that everyone can keep up.

I’m lucky to have access to the computers in the lab, so I can put documents and example spreadsheets on them ahead of time. One of the most important things in teaching novice users is that they’re often bad typists so saying “Type a few paragraphs and then we’ll edit them” is a recipe for disaster and frustration. I usually have them work from some standard text like The Gift of the Magi or something I’ve copied from Wikipedia. I’m also very clear about what sorts of things on the computers are customizeable and what are functions of how the computers work. For new users, they can’t tell what’s a setting — all those annoying pop-up warnings using Internet Explorer when you go to a secure site for example — and what’s something you can’t easily edit — how the cursor behaves. One of the biggest thigns I had to learn is that a lot of my students have no idea what the word “default” means, so when you say “Oh that’s just the way MS Word is set as a default…” that’s not a sense-making sentence to them. We spend half a class just adjusting the settings, turning off grammar-checker, adding and removing toolbars, so they know how to do that if they ever get a computer at home.

It’s fun work and I really enjoy it. Over the years people have emailed me asking for advice so I’ve zipped up my class handouts and sample documents and made them available here. Please feel free to use them in your classes in any way you’d like to. If you do, please remove my name and email address first :)

• Microsoft Word Classes (for the pre-2007 versions of Word)
• Microsoft Excel Classes (pre-2007)
• My First Webpage Classes (possibly out of date)

Enjoy!