Paint this picture in your head. It’s three in the morning and you’re adding the final touches to a report you’ve been working on non-stop for the past five days. You’re just about to finish your finishing points when your computer dies. After a lengthy caffeine-induced panic you get your computer up and running again only to realise you’ve just lost that page you’ve just written. That’ll cost you…

It’s almost mind-boggling that today we have databases that will save themselves as well as back themselves up after a change has been made when widely-used applications like Microsoft Word (and the rest of the Office family) cannot save after a single edit has been made.

There are times when such a feature wouldn’t be wanted, like when mistakes are made, but wouldn’t this be a job for the undo button? If we can automatically save documents then surely we can automatically back up previous versions as well! I know Word can save version histories, but it’s just not powerful enough for my needs!

The upgrade from Office 2003 to 2007 at university was painful for many. When students are struggling to find features on a software package they’ve used all their lives you know there is a problem. What is most painful to me is not the interface, it’s how simplistic things like this are completely overlooked! I had always found MS Office to be one of the strongest applications Microsoft had ever released to the public, so why mess up such a good thing by drastically changing the style and not the functionality? Office 2007 does have some fantastic features that tidy up the whole document creating process, but what I want is stability in a program.

Hopefully the next version of Office will have the feature to automatically save and back up every change made to a file. If MS Office could provide me with an adequate environment with some of the functional trimmings, auto-save and back up functionality, and guaranteed crash recovery (perhaps through email in case a user cannot get back onto a computer) then I would rush out and buy it as soon as possible.