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Angelo Campanella
 
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John Campbell wrote:
I just saw this - it is identical to an issue I posted about a week or two
ago. Exactly the same symptom. I use the workaround to File/SaveAs and
overwrite the current version, but I learned that the temp file contains the
changes I made most recently.


'Jennifer' advised that I could avoid increasingly large .DOC files via
profuse editing by the sav-as mode, and I now use it all the time.

Did you get a resolution to this? Is it a plugin or service that is
interfering?


The phenomenon occurs when one wants to have their cake and eat it, too.
That is, the Track Changes mode is extremely useful when developing
technical text, as 'everything must be just so' in prose logic, and
sometimes takes a try, or two, or three. However, having constructed
much of the document that way, and past activities now becoming true
history, the old accumulations required to track changes are now
obsolete and should be discarded. In my case, the files so accumulated
sometimes become 2 to five times the size of the cleaned file; a waste
of HD space, and a threat to stability, since the history file cane be
very tortuous, containing huge blocks (pages) moved from from to back,
etc., plus a lot of typos fixed, pictures in and out; a real dog's
breakfast. This can be a threat to system stability. (My ACAD system in
the 1980's crashed frequently this way, not the accumulation; just the
back-and-fill editing.)

I don't know whether the Word software designers fully appreciated this
MO in users' deployments of their software. But I, for one, being a
technical writer since 1953 (then, my MS thesis in physics) use this
method. Before 1980 (Wang era), I wrote a long rough paper by hand
expressing the kernel of my thoughts, then literally cut it up into
short strips of content and reassembled it in the classical technical
paper outline, repeating that process as many times as needed to "get
there from here".

Today, with word processors, scissors and scotch tape or staplers are no
longer needed, but, by golly, my mind still works the same way.

So, I suggest that a save mode which I term "save, cleaned", or "Clean
Save" needs to be added to the File menu.

Angelo Campanella

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