@blakeyrat said:
@dtobias said:Does anybody have any idea how I can possibly train non-techie office workers, who sometimes in the course of their jobs need to send files to me that need to be run through some program, imported into a database, etc., into giving me the file in the form in which it is originally received by them (e.g., comma-separated-values), unmangled by a trip through the digestive tract of some program that Windows chooses to open the file in (Excel, Notepad, etc.)?Tell them to forward the email to you, or give you the FTP/whatever credentials instead of downloading it themselves. Don't rely on them to pass the files to you; get the files from the same source they do.
You've seriously never hit upon this solution?
@dtobias said:
25 years of point-and-drool operating systems seem to have thoroughly expunged any concept that people may have ever had to the effect that the proper way to give somebody a copy of a file is to actually copy the file, at the raw operating system level which does not involve slurping it into some application and then barfing it out again.And I'm sure you're going to back-up your thesis here with evidence that this is due to "point-and-drool operating systems" any... second... now...
@dtobias said:
(from their web browser, email program, or however they received the file in the first place)And you haven't solved this by getting access to the web browser, email, or however they received the file in the first place because...?
Those monkeys who stack crates to get at the bananas figure things out quicker than you. Alternate theory: your co-workers are fucking up the files on purpose because you're such an asshole.
Wow, I want to live in the same world that the mean man lives in, where IT is the dog and users are the tail.