what does fast save do?

On Sat, 17 Sep 2005 18:37:04 -0700, flyboy
wrote:

what does fast save do?

Quick answer: It causes documents to be corrupted. Don't use it.

Longer answer: When you save an existing document with Fast Saves
turned on, Word writes only the changes into the disk file, tacking
them onto the end of the original along with instructions about where
the changes should go. Since the changes are usually much less
material than the entire document, this is supposed to go quicker than
writing the whole document to the disk file. When the amount of
tacked-on changes reaches some threshold, Word does a full save and
then starts accumulating changes again. So much for the theory.

In practice, Word has had a distressing tendency to miscalculate the
pointers that tell it where the changes go, and to mess up when the
changes involve the more complicated parts of a document such as
tables and numbered lists. When that happens, the document is
"corrupted" and doesn't display properly -- or you may not be able to
open it at all.

To top it off, the whole scheme started when hard drives and CPUs were
much slower than they are now. Today it's hard to find a computer so
slow that Fast Saves makes any noticeable difference in the speed of
saving files unless they're really huge.

Don't use it.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org

On top of what Jay said... Fast Save can be really fun for voyeurs. Even if
the document isn't corrupted, you can use "Recover text from any document"
to read such files and see all kinds of potentially embarrassing things that
the author "deleted". While Word is supposed to do a clean save when you
close the file, in some past versions, it didn't (not sure about Word 2003).
Letters to "Bosses" are notorious for containing all kinds of things that
the author just wanted to see onscreen, but decided not to keep, discretion
being the better part of valor and all that...

Enter Fast Save... and Surprise!

So, yeah... Fast Save is just asking for trouble, in more ways than you
might expect.

--
Herb Tyson MS MVP
Please respond in the newsgroups so everyone can follow along.
http://www.herbtyson.com
"Jay Freedman" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 17 Sep 2005 18:37:04 -0700, flyboy
wrote:

what does fast save do?

Quick answer: It causes documents to be corrupted. Don't use it.