Kunal Singh Speaks

I recently faced troubles while using the “Track Changes” feature of Microsoft word. We were making a design specification document for a customer, and we started an internal discussion (before sharing this document with the customer), once the initial draft of the document was ready. We used the “Track Changes” feature to keep track of the document internally. Trouble started when we finally wanted to send out the document to our customer. We did not want the customer to know, what changes we made to the document during our internal discussion, and we wanted just the final draft (no previous history) to be shared with the customer. Sadly, we could not figure out any way to complete remove the history tracked using “track changes”. We even tried copy-pasting the contents of current document to a new document. But it did not help, as the history also got copied to the new document. As a last ditch effort, we asked for a solution to “Professor Google”. But, professor was as clueless (I hope that there was no conspiracy by professor to block the information for some personal reasons).
We were left with following options:
(1) Re-type the document: Oh, what a waste of time it is.
(2) Convert to PDF and send to the customer: This was not desired. Since a lot of discussion was to happen with customer on this document, and thee were further changes needed to document (not using “track changes” I wish), we wanted it to be MS doc format.
(3) Convert to PDF, and then convert back to word: We did not have the required softwares for this. Does MS realize what business they will be giving to their competitors if we had to buy these softwares.
I will leave it for you to speculate, what we finally did.
….
If some one (including MS) has figured out a way to complete delete the history of track changes from a MS doc, please share this information. It will be very helpful.
…
If some one has figured out any more troubling features with MS word, please feel free to leave a post here.

Last one year has been a dramatic period of my life. I started using Linux, I decided to get married, I got fired from job and I decided to move to a minimum feature cell phone. I finally settled down with a Nokia-1100. The best part about this phone is the battery life. I charge it for 45 minutes once in every 5 days. The only problem I have with this phone happens while I am trying to make a call, and some one else calls me up. The incoming call gets received (automatically), and it goes on hold (automatically) and then gets disconnected (automatically). This is not the kind of automation one would like
….
If some one has figured out any other bugs with the phone (which is rare with nokia phones), please feel free to post it here.

I had been using MS Web Outlook for last 3 months, and noticed some very irritating features:
(1) Outlook has a great security features, which causes the current session to expire after some time (I am not sure if this time-out period can be programmed by the user). This feature becomes a fuss, when you type a very long mail, and then click the send option. You get timed-out and are asked to log-in again. The mail which you typed has been lost. I could not figure out any way, where the typed text can automatically be saved to draft (most of the web-based editors support it these days).
(2) If you are replying to an e-mail, you can either “reply” to the sender or you can “reply-all” to every one in the mailing list. I could not figure out any way where you can send the reply to every one except few (in other mail clients you can choose reply-all and then delete some of the mail-ids from list, but here it was not possible). If I want to reply to “all except few”, what I would need to do is to enter all the mail-ids one by one (instead of being able to delete a few).
…
If some one has information about any fix/upgrade/correct-usage of the above, please share it here. If you have faced any more fussy-features with microsoft e-mail clients, please post them here.