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Abstract
Have you ever been SO engaged, so plugged into something you were doing that all your system resources were diverted in order to focus on a specific task? So much so that things like your dexterity rating plummets and your face-palm frequency soars? Yeah… I have. This is a story about how a simple oversight cost me about 45 minutes worth of work and a ton of frustration. Don’t worry, there’s a somewhat happy ending as I found a way to save myself in the event I foul something like this up again! Alright… here we go…
So today I finished eating lunch a bit early so I headed over to the Success Community to see if there were any issues I could help resolve. After a few quick answers, I came upon an issue that, while I knew how to resolve, I realized it wasn’t going to be a quick anything. I looked at the clock. I looked at my afternoon schedule. I decided to offer my input.
Man… it was a good post, too. Bullet points. Step-by-step instructions with screenshots and hyperlinks to Help pages that, while the person didn’t ask for them, knowing what they were about to embark on, I had a feeling they may need.
This is where my kids’ (my) guinea pigs come in. Ya… I know… Hard left… You see, about three months ago, we rescued these two cute little guinea pigs. They were found abandoned in a college dorm room. Sad , really. Long story short, they ended up at our house and here’s how it went:
- Day 1: All five kids loved the guinea pigs and helped out daily.
- Day 30: Three of my kids loved the guinea pigs and helped out as they remembered to.
- Day 60: My three year old and I love the guinea pigs. She comes to see them whenever she can sneak into my office. (I work from home)
That’s right. I share an office/spare bedroom with two, very cute, little fur balls named Bella and Lulu. After a lot of time, love and patients they’re doing wonderfully now and are located to the immediate left of where I’m sitting at this very moment.
What most people don’t know, unless of course you have two or more guinea pigs, is that they seem to feel as though they need to show all the other guinea pigs who’s in charge. Really. Given the opportunity to, they’ll try to prove that their the toughest little 8 ounce bad-ass you’ve ever seen. They do this thing called rumblestrutting. It’s where they make these weird purring sounds while walking around like a little sumo wrestler.
Anyway, it was about this time that two things happened.
- I was finishing up, what I felt was, a pretty good post.
- Little Bella the bad-ass guinea pig attempted to prove her dominance over her cage mate, Lulu.
An all out brawl ensued. In a flash these two little balls of fuzz started nipping and squealing and jumping all over their cage. It only lasted about 30 seconds, but it was enough time for me to inadvertently click outside of the form box I’d been crafting my post in. I looked up at my screen, hit the backspace key to correct an error and inadvertently navigated away from the page I was on before clicking the “Answer” button.
I swore. I cried. I went for a walk.
Always remember, Salesforce is like any other website. Unless you take action to commit the changes you’ve made before you navigate away from a page… they’re gone. Peace, we out! There’s no getting them back.
The moral of the story…
If you don’t hit SAVE, it doesn’t happen.
Navigate away from your page without saving and you may as well have never done it in the first place.
It’s gone…
Or, is it??
Loss Prevention
Immediately upon regaining composure, I began looking for a solution that would keep me from getting myself in a situation like this again.
Enter Lazarus: Form Recovery
From the author: Ever had one of those “oh $*#@” moments when you’ve finally finished filling out a long form, and hit submit only to see an error message? And when you hit the back button, the form was blank… If so, you know you need Lazarus. And if not, you have a chance to install Lazarus before disaster strikes!
Lazarus saves everything you type so if the worst happens you can recover the whole form by simply clicking a menu item. The data can be encrypted and is saved on your machine so you know it’s safe.
Available for both Firefox and Chrome, this little baby can be a real life saver!
Once installed, simply right click on the form field at the center of your “Oh $*#@” moment, hover over “Recover Text” and select the bit of text you’d like to recover.
Simple. Brilliant.
Click here to get it for Chrome. Click here to get it for Firefox.
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