Rescuing a Failed Post

You've just crafted a wonderful, thoughtful, erudite page of insightful commentary and wisdom. It has taken you 20 minutes to carefully piece together. You click on the Post button at the bottom...and the Forum baulks! Error message. Your work is lost!! Did the network go down?! Aaaargh!

STOP!

• Do not close the browser window!
• Do not reboot
• Do not heave your laptop into the round filing cabinet!
  

On most occasions, if this happens, you can simply click on the Back button on your web browser. This will take you back to where you just were and you can rescue your text even if the Forum has gone completely off line.

• Click somewhere in the message window text where you just wrote your stuff.
• Click on Edit Select All on your web browser's menu. (This will highlight all the text)
• Click on Edit Copy
• Ignore the web browser window for the moment
• Open Microsoft Word
• Create a New Document (there may be a blank one there already)
• Click on Edit Paste to insert the text that you just copied to the Windows clipboard.
• Save the document as a Word document.
  

Now it is safely stored on your hard drive. You can now use a variation on the above process to then copy and paste your text into the Forum when you next get connected.

The above looks like a complicated process but is really quite simple if you give it a whirl. It is also a process that you can use in a wide range of situations where you are trying to post a big block of text into an online form using a web browser.

A very simple tip...and apologies to you experts out there...but this tip has saved some of our faculty a lot of grief.