Facebook post 1: "I've just been working on my essay for the last twelve hours solid [yeah, right] and Word crashed and deleted it and now I've lost everything!"
Or, "My laptop just died / my memory stick broke and I've lost my entire dissertation."Entirely avoidable. At zero cost. If you don't solve this, you're an idiot, and I reserve the right to laugh mockingly at your pitiful cries of anguish.
- Sign up for a Dropbox account. (Other providers are available.)
- Download the app for your PC, Mac or even Linux box.
- Make sure you save ALL your uni work into your Dropbox folder. You can even move your My Documents folder into Dropbox, so everything you save goes there (if you have enough space).
Why do this?
- All your work is backed up online. If your laptop is lost or breaks, no worries - all your data is safely out there in the Cloud.
- If you accidentally delete or overwrite a file, or Word messes it up for you (yeah, sure it did) then just go to the Dropbox website and recover a previous version.
- Battery flat? Need to access your files from the library and don't have your laptop? Just log into the Dropbox website and bingo, everything's there.
- Want to just check something in a document quickly? Access Dropbox from your tablet or smartphone too.
Facebook post 2: "I hate Harvard referencing! It'll be the death of me!"
Er, you do know that Microsoft Word will do all that nasty referencing for you? Including all the silly formatting? And also deal with referencing PDFs and websites and anything else you need?
There are a few guides to do this (Google it), but here's one of them, which also explains how to download additional files to support your university's preferred referencing style.
Simply add details of any work you reference in an easy-to-use database in Word, then in a single click you can add a pointer to any reference, or even specific pages of it. If you use the same references in multiple essays, you can even copy them between files.
Word will automatically insert a fully-formatted, auto-updating list of all your references at the end of your work. It's so easy it's not even funny.
You're welcome.
You're welcome.
There's a third. Rename your USB memory stick with your phone number. That way, if you leave it somewhere, it does have a vague chance of making its way back to you.
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