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An AppleScript to reduce large Word file sizes
Authored by: carsten on May 21, '03 10:48:23PM

A bit of trivia:

The MS Word "Allow fast saves" option was originally designed (and was at one time actually useful) in the days before most computers booted and ran off of hard disks, a time when you had no choice but to save your document to a floppy disk (such as B: on the PC).

The "Allow fast saves" option simply appended the changes since the last save onto the end of the the document without having to rewrite the entire document out to the slow floppy disk, an operation that could take many minutes to complete especially for long documents.

In my personal opinion, only MS would retain such a feature many, many years even after it was no longer required--with hard disks standard on all computers nowadays an extra 0.25 seconds to save a document makes virtually no difference. When working with very, very large documents perhaps it makes a difference during saves, but the speed advantage is lost each time a document is loaded because Word takes slightly longer to *load* a "fast-saved" document.

Turning off "Allow fast saves" in Word has been the only workaround for certain obscure bugs in the Macintosh version of Word in the past (search the Microsoft website for fast save, maybe some of the problems from years ago are still in their' database),so I'm not surprised to hear there are still problems even today when it is turned on.



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