The version suicides, Part 1

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Sorry.

That headline’s bad. Really bad.¹

But try and set that aside for a moment and follow along with me, because this series just might save your ass.

First, though, close your eyes and imagine a world where writing projects—whether they’re novels or family holiday newsletters—go smoothly, from the first shitty draft through the final polished revision, ready to release into the wild of the real world.

Keep your eyes closed.

Next, I want you to visualize never having <Ctrl-Z> rendered useless by a sudden loss of power to your computer.

Now imagine a writing session where you’ve noodled with a paragraph—or an entire scene or chapter—and absolutely adored every word you wrote. In fact, you loved it so much you clicked Save the second after you wrote it because it’s as perfect as perfect can be.

Now wake up, because that world exists only in a dream.

We all know the reality of things is much, much different. No, what we experience is typically opposite of how we want it to go:

• Microsoft Word crashes and we pray to the Writing Gods, as the program restarts, that the auto-recovery save ran sometime before the doc went tits up. But we all know too well that we’re probably hosed.
• We spend a half hour tweaking a scene, hitting <Ctrl-S> numerous times. You know, just to be safe. Then we realize we liked it better the way it was two days ago.
• We leave an unsaved version of our work open on the computer desktop and a family member closes it down. “Oh, I just clicked No because I assumed you saved it already.” This, of course, leaves us channeling Nancy Kerrigan, circa 1994. “Why? Why? Why?”
• Insert some other similarly tragic end here. There really are eight million stories in the naked city.

I’m a tech writer at my day job. I work with and write about technology just about every week day of the year. As part of that work, I maintain more than a dozen book-length printed documents and nearly a thousand HTML files. (Yes, I realize that’s a silly nightmare considering how simple it is to deliver dynamic content these days.)

Considering, my co-worker and I would be screwed if we didn’t have some sort of system that helps us keep track of versions. That’s why we use version control tools.

“What’re those,” you ask. “And why should I care?”

Were you not paying attention? Jeesh. You think I type this stuff up for my health?

In all seriousness, version control tools allow you to keep track of multiple versions of your documents without actually maintaining multiple copies of the documents themselves. With version control you can forever banish Save as… to the Island of Unused Toolbar Commands.

How is this possible?

Simple.

Version control tools are just repositories—or databases—that do all the revision management for you:

• No more maintenance of multiple files and folders.
• No more cryptic file naming conventions to keep things straight.
• No more remembering whether you just did a Save as… or a normal Save.

Intrigued?

Then be sure to drop by in the coming days for parts 2 and 3 of… The version suicides.

Tags: Microsoft Word, version control, Writing

1. Count your lucky stars… I almost titled this series, “Versions? We don’t need no stinking versions.” [⇑]

Tagged as: Microsoft Word, version control, Writing