I will always put a date on every report or document I produce, that is not going to get one added automatically. (E.g., blog entries and emails get a time stamp added; I don’t have to.)
I bet that literally half of the papers—white papers and other reports—I find on the Internet have no indication of when they were written. If I am looking for something on, let’s say, “Traffic Generation Systems,” (network test devices), and I find a paper “LARIAT: Lincoln Adaptable Real-time Information Assurance Testbed, I believe it would be nice to have, somewhere clearly visible, an indication of when it was written. I am not picking on the writers of this paper. As I said, probably half of the academic reports on the Internet suffer from a lack of a time stamp indicating when it was written.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Oh, it's worse than that. If a document is in Word format, half the time any dates in the document show up as TODAY's date. This usually occurs in headers/footers, but sometimes on the title page as well. It is a result of entering a formatted date via the Insert menu and it's an example of an application being too clever by half.
Indeed. PowerPoint also. Print a document, and the date and time that you clicked "Print…" is added to the slides or handouts. There are times when one needs to catalog when a document was printed. "Almost never" or "never" for most of us.
I thought recording the date of completion or presentation was"standard operating procedure" for any written or presented work. Learn or notice something new every day!
Post a Comment