I have just sent an invoice as an email attachment, but the word document, when read by the recipient, is slightly different from the one I sent. The figure of £4,400.00 has become £4,440.00.
It sounds unbelievable, but seems to be true. Talking to my colleague apparently this is a known glitch, caused by the compression and then re-constitution of data. Sometimes bits get transposed or lost.
What do you experts think about this - can it really happen?
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>> I have just sent an invoice as an email attachment, but the word document, when
>> read by the recipient, is slightly different from the one I sent. The figure of
>> £4,400.00 has become £4,440.00.
>> It sounds unbelievable, but seems to be true. Talking to my colleague apparently this is
>> a known glitch, caused by the compression and then re-constitution of data. Sometimes bits get
>> transposed or lost.
>>
>> What do you experts think about this - can it really happen?
No not via email. Various stuff might happen between versions of word, but i have never heard it changing alpha numeric text.
Last edited by: Zero on Thu 11 Sep 14 at 16:14
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Get him to re-attach and send it back, see what you get. Any chance there are two lines showing the numbers, there is an error in the original and you are now looking in different places?
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We use Open Office, not MS Office, and find some glitches between this and the various Word *doc versions, but I've never seen this.
We never send invoices as Word documents.
We convert them to PDFs - word docs can be edited. (I know that it's possible to edit PDFs, but it's more difficult)
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Can't see any way whatsoever it could happen with a Word document, imagine the chaos if subtle changes happened to electronic documents when they were transferred between systems.
Not that unusual on modern faxes or copiers where, as already mentioned, the text is compressed and doesn't always decompress 100% correctly, see link below
www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/22/xerox_copier_bugfix/
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I can't reproduce the effect, although I've tried sending the original document to my home email address and back.
There doesn't seem to be anything odd about the document - no hidden lines obscured by box margins or anything like that.
So just one of those odd things that can't happen.
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Only thing I can think of is, did you have to document open in Word and then use the option to send as an email from Word. Then you changed the figure in the document and saved it. The versions are therefore different.
If the version sent was different, then what about checking your sent items folder in your email client (Outlook?). Also what is the last edited time stamp on the sent version.
Sending an email won't have involved compressing the document unless you stuck it in a ZIP file. It will have probably been a MIME attachment that will be the actual Word document.
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Odd email glitch - Zero
