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Venting is a place where Lemmy users can rant/vent about anything that is on their mind. If you are annoyed or very pissed off about something, you can talk about it here and our community will listen.

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I hate being asked to convert PDFs (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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It happens all the frickin' time. Someone wants to convert a PDF file to Word. Fine, we have tools for that, but depending on the quality of the PDF, the resulting text may contain some errors or just complete gibberish. But then you find out that they had the original Word file all along. I hate that so much.

And now today happens! But this time it's different. Someone wants to convert a PDF... to an Excel file. Are you fucking kidding me right now? I have an urge to run down the office with a megaphone screaming "WE DO NOT EDIT PDF FILES! WE MAKE PDFS WHEN WE'RE DONE EDITING THE DOCUMENT!".

Our department keeps refusing conversions from PDFs to other formats, because the conversion is not always accurate or reliable, so we direct our users to the tools we have available for this sort of thing, while clearly pointing out the downsides of the conversion process and explicitly stating that ensuring the accuracy of the conversion is the responsibility of said user, not our department. Because, inevitably, the software WILL make some mistakes. Os become zeroes, 5 becomes the letter S and don't even get me started on the whole capital i, lower l and number 1 situation.

And despite all of this, despite all the warnings and examples of failings in the past, nobody seems to get through their hollow skulls that they should avoid editing and converting PDFs just because of how much of a pain in the ass it is! Ugh.

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[–] themeatbridge 16 points 3 days ago

"No." is a complete sentence.

[–] slazer2au 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Take it up to management, not your circus not your monkeys.

If you are management, talk to your fellow managers and ask them to remind their staff to stop sending requests, it is not a service you provided.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (2 children)

We did. Management agreed. Management told the others. Little to no change, unfortunately. Some of our users are just too stubborn and/or lazy.

[–] Diplomjodler3 17 points 3 days ago

"This is not a service we provide." Simple as that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Get it in writing and copy paste to everyone asking

[–] LesserAbe 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Don't know your situation, but sometimes when you demonstrate you're able to do something, people keep on wanting you to do that thing. If it was me I would stop helping or even pointing to resources. For me it's hard to do because I naturally want to help, but at a certain point you're just enabling other people's poor processes.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

If OP just can't say no for some reason, they may become an unreliable supplier with shifting deadlines, because, like, they put lower priority on tasks that aren't their primary work. This goes up to the point most people would consider to reprint and edit that stuff themselves.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Your department doesn't probably even cross paths with such tasks. If they got pdfs from elsewhere, why would they ask you?