You never can tell

Last week we were handed a real poser. I directory full of 20-year-old Microsoft "Works" files (from V3 if you're interested). Could we convert this to Word format? We said we'd give it a go.

Microsoft stopped support for this product years ago. Originally there were tools available for various early versions of Office that would allow you to open Works files - but they too are long since passed.

In desperation we even built a Windows XP machine and installed Office 97 (not something that we thought we'd ever do again!) - but the required downloads were not available, so this avenue, too was closed.

Eventually we found a manual converter which did the trick - one at a time. And there were hundreds! Two cups of tea later we'd written a script that sequenced the files through the converter, put the results in an output folder and told us when it was finished. Nice! OK, it wasn't rocket science, but it did result in one happy customer. Unfortunately we can't invoice him for all the hours this took, but it was a satisfying job none the less.