Thank you, Terry. I had part of it right but you said it ever so much better
than I would have.

--

JoAnn Paules
MVP Microsoft [Publisher]



"TF" terryfarrell%40%6d%73%6e%2ecom wrote in message
...
The reasons were mainly that floppies are (relatively) VERY slow to read
or
write and not the most reliable media. When Word saves (especially in
older
versions), it needs to build up the saved file and it does this by
creating
a temporary file in the target folder gradually adding or overwriting bits
until it has a complete file. This is then rewritten and saved as the
document file. But the temp file is locked and active until the document
is
fully closed and Word/Windows releases the temp file.

Problems become serious if the file is fairly large or the floppy is
partially filled because the document file and the temp files may have
insufficient room to co-exist on the floppy. To make matters worse,
simultaneous reading and writing to the floppy is happening at the very
slow
rate of the floppy drive.

So all in all, it was hardly surprising that floppies were a disaster with
Word! The best and safest solution for you is to write your macro to save
the file to the main HDD and then COPY or MOVE it to the mem stick.

Although Word is not so demanding these days, problems still do occur. I
have a colleague who has now twice corrupted large documents using a
memory
stick to move between home and work to continue working on a document.

You now know the risks!

--
Terry Farrell - Word MVP
http://word.mvps.org/

wrote in message ...
: Quite a lot has been written about avoiding corruption of documents, and
: one piece of advice has been "do not save to A: from Word (though from
: Explorer is okay). I habitually save to a memory stick/flash drive in
: drive E and I would like to automate this with a VBA macro. Does anyone
: have any information on why saving to A: from Word causes corruption,
: and more importantly whether or not saving to E: poses the same danger?
: Alternatively (and OT) is it possible to write a VBA (or other) Macro to
: invoke this procedure from a hot key while in Windows Explorer (where I
: currently do this manually)?
:
: TIA