Taxes are always the highlight of my year, a couple months of dreading having to get them done - followed by a couple weeks that are dedicated to sorting credit card receipts and phone bills.  Stacks of papers covering every flat surface available.   This year our accountant thought it was an April Fools joke when I delivered the folder to his door yesterday.   When we lived in Ithaca getting the taxes done early meant getting to the post office before 10 PM on April 15th.

So this year went pretty smoothly until Excel decided that AtariAce-Books-2007.xls was "unable to open".  I went through all the normal fear and rage.  Shutdown my computer cleared my cache and tried three different ways of opening the file.  I took the file to Carrie's computer and crashed her Open Office with the file (which crashed the file she hadn't saved after an hour's work).  Sorry again ;(  After doing a little research online I found out that there is an entire industry that has written programs to recover crashed Microsoft Files.

I understand data recovery services, hardware fails and people don't do backups enough, but known file corruption recovery is just wrong.  We are so captive to Microsoft that they don't have to give us products that actually work.  If there are 10 competing products that can repair a file that Microsoft Excel failed to save correctly than the problem is well known and Microsoft should give this service away for free.  I'm not a Google worshipper, there are serious privacy concerns with their software, but at least we are starting to have some options.