Magic

It’s easy to lose sight sometimes of how “magical” what we do in tech support can appear to the people we support. Over the last couple of days I’ve had the opportunity to work on a couple of problems for our users that, well let’s just say that the solutions to these problems won’t come as a big surprise to the techies who normally read this site.

One, we have a number of Word documents that were created from a master that had a corrupt table. Now, in Word 2000 the corrupt table actually didn’t create a problem, until you try to share this document with someone using 2003. So, while a user who’s been upgraded to 2003 can’t open the document, I can use the Open and Repair function of Word 2003 to not only get it open, but fix the document completely.

The other solution involved a user who used the print to file function to create PRN files, then brought those in to work and couldn’t figure out how to print them. A quick trip to grab Ghostscript and GSview provided me with an easy way to print those off for him.

Obviously, those of you working in IT for awhile know that neither of these solutions were THAT complicated, but that’s not the point. The point is that having the knowledge to find these solutions, and how they applied to the problem at hand, is the real “magic” of tech support. We know it’s not really magic, but sometimes knowledge in an area other than your own, can appear to be.

tags: Word2003, Ghostscript, Magic

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