I can be a silly sod sometimes. This morning I resolved something I’d been fretting about for over two years with a five minute Google search. The night before I submitted my masters thesis, I sent it to my parents for one final check. They sent it back to me, the Is dotted and the Ts crossed, as a .doc and a .pdf file, the latter of which I forwarded to my examiners. I saved the .doc to my Mac as a .odt file. The odd thing was, they didn’t match: the .pdf was a page longer, and the lines didn’t match.

That made me fret. Why were they not exactly alike? Fool that I am, I decided to do a wordcount by copying and pasting the pdf into word for mac, only to find there was a 99 word difference. That made me worry even more. It wasn’t until weeks later that it occurred to me that it was counting the page numbers from the copied file, so there was no difference.

My fretting, however, went on. I asked my parents about it, who told me to stop worrying and get on with something more constructive. I tried to, but although I put the issue to the back of my mind, I couldn’t shake the thought that the document had been altered somehow. My masters thesis is the piece of work I’m most proud of, but such a discrepancy may have implied that the work was not entirely my own.

I knew that such a thought was, of course, absurd. Why would my parents have changed it? And what could they have done to alter it, yet still keep the wordcount the same. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find a mismatch in the wording. Even so, I couldn’t stop worrying. It wasn’t an issue as much as a nagging curiosity. While I couldn’t be bothered to compare the two files line by line, whole paragraphs in one appeared to be on totally different pages in the other. Yet how and why would anyone have made such changes, given they had so little time and still retained an almost identical wordcount? Why indeed go to so much effort on my masters thesis.

As ridiculous as these questions were, they refused to leave my mind. And then lying in bed last night it came to me. It was simple: the conversion from .doc to odt must have caused the slight change in formatting. That would also explain why my mum and dad didn’t know what I was talking about, as they would have saved the file to PDF before my computer changed it. All I had to do to resolve the whole dilemma was Google whether such changes can occur, and sure enough I found they can. So much fretting, all because of a simple change of file type. I can be a silly sod sometimes.