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Pointers Can Be Sharp

Rob Farley describes a bad day he had:

There was a guy who needed to get his timesheets in. It wasn’t me – I just thought I could help …by making a copy of his timesheets in a separate table, so that he could prepare them there instead of having to use the clunky Access form. I’d gone into the shared Access file that people were using, made a copy of it, and then proceeded to clear out all the data that wasn’t about him, so that he could get his data ready. I figured once he was done, I’d just drop his data in amongst everyone else’s – and that would be okay.

Except that right after I’d cleared out everyone else’s data, everyone else started to complain that their data wasn’t there.

Heart-rate increased. I checked that I was using the copy, not the original… I closed it, opened the original, and saw that sure enough, only his data was there. Everyone else’s (including my own) data was gone.

As far as “oops” moments go, yeah, this is definitely on the list.  Read on for Rob’s explanation of what happened.