Jeremy Visser

I’ve been doing this assignment on system evaluation and change management as part of my TAFE course. Basically, what I’ve needed to do so far is research a hardware auditing tool (I chose OCS Inventory NG), change management software (if you actually buy any change management software, you’ve been duped hard — it’s not much different from bug tracking software), and produce some forms used for manual hardware auditing.

Well, I thought I would save some time by creating the hardware audit form in a table separate ODT document, and use OpenOffice.org’s Insert → Section feature to add the linked document to my report. That way, I could edit the document with the table in it, and have the one linked inside my report automatically, as well as link the table to other documents.

That was all well and good, except after I saved and closed down everything, and attempted to open it the next day, every document that had been linked to my hardware audit form had been corrupted.

As ODF documents are really just zip files with XML documents inside, I opened one of my ODF files in an unzipper. Interestingly, all the files extracted fine, except for content.xml. This was the same for all the documents.

So, content.xml got corrupted after linking the document to an external document? I’m probably just jumping to conclusions — after all, correlation does not mean causation, and the file could have been corrupted by another way. I can’t think why, though, especially seeing as though I was working on lots of documents at the time, and only the ones linked to this particular table were corrupted.

Luckily, I have a backup that I made on Monday, so I only lost the work I did on it yesterday. Here’s hoping this doesn’t happen to me again.

Update: Another two documents got corrupted today. These documents were completely unrelated, and weren’t linked to any others. I’m starting to look at OpenOffice.org 3.0 as a culprit.