Hi ?B?S1RK?=,

Can you explain this as I frequently teach this feature to teachers and
students to show objective progress with written expression.
Thank you.

Difficult to go into any more detail, really, but...

The Word binary file structure is not particularly robust. A lot of information is
saved "in the last paragraph mark"; you'll see this if you copy/paste everything
EXCEPT the last paragraph mark into a new document.

What this really means is, that a lot of information concerning how a document is
laid out and formatted isn't saved in the text flow, but at either end of the text
flow. Save a Word 2000-2003 file to HTML, or a Word 2003 document to XML then open
it in Notepad (or as a plain text file in Word) and take a look at it.

Now add some section breaks to the document and change headers/footers, margins,
etc. Take a look at the internal structures again, and you'll see that a lot of
information is stored "in the section breaks", as well.

Everything one adds to a document that falls into this massive data cache can
potnetially destabilize the file structure. It shouldn't happen, but experience
proves that, all too often, things "get mixed up". What, exactly, can cause things
to "get mixed up" is uncertain; Word occasionally seems to "hiccup" (might be a
glitch when writing to disk or the network, for example).

Since, when you save multiple versions in a document, you're saving a copy of the
entire document within the binary structure, as well as information concerning the
version, the potential for strucutural damage (and thus loss of the entire document)
increase accordingly. It's happened to me, and since introduction of this feature,
we've seen numerous posts in these newsgroups that support the theory. Not as many
as for the Master Document feature, but enough so that personally, I'd never
recommend it for an important file.

In the future, you may want to save under FileVersions. This automatically
dates and times your document if you save the version. You can also add
comments for review at a later time.

In my experience, this is a very dangerous thing to do. The Versions feature is
a frequent source of document corruption and should rather be avoided...


Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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