Oh Word!

It is feeling like a bit of a crunch time for me with everything I have on the go. Between the play at the Edmonton Fringe I have written (and editing), directing, producing, and a bunch of other related aspects of it, I have other work I have to fit in.

So, yesterday and today I decided to devote to a couple things I had partly forgot about, and partly procrastinated about. They are related to my teaching Lego Robotics to students in grades 4-6.

I was teaching an after school club in April through early June. As part of that teaching I am to submit a final report by the end of the month (this coming Friday). Luckily this is the second year I have taught it, and so I was able to revise my previous report - keeping some basic information about the Lego Robotics the same.

As I was doing that I was also thinking about the Lego Robotics summer school I will be teaching in a couple weeks. I wanted to get some of the worksheets done this week anyway, because I could then get them off to be photocopied before the classes start.

So, I have been revising what I had in the after school club, and expanding on some of it. While I was doing that, I started to notice how finicky Microsoft Word 2007 was getting.

I have a table (as below) in the worksheet that I was trying to copy based on different parts of the programming I was going to teach them.

	Challenge (What the robot will do)	Date Outlined	Date Programmed	Checked (by teacher)
1
2
3
4
5

However, whenever I tried to copy the table the formatting disappeared. I searched Google, and the help, and nothing solved my problem.

I even restarted Word, and still the problem wasn't resolving itself.

I eventually started to close all the windows I had open to do a restart of my computer (which I do shut off almost daily). After I closed a few open programs, including Word, I decided to try again before actually restarting.

Lo and behold! the table copied properly! I'm guessing that there might have been a formatting conflict between a program I had open and Word - such that formatting disappeared off anything on the clipboard.