Controlling Background Saving

You already know that it is important to periodically save your documents. This helps protect your work in case of catastrophic power failure or inadvertent massive edits (such as those imposed by an errant macro). When your document is small, saving to disk can be done very quickly. As your document grows, or as you start saving your document to storage devices that aren't that speedy, saving can take quite a bit longer to do.

To overcome the delay normally associated with saving a document, Word uses what is known as "background saving." This simply means that Word allows you to continue working as it actually writes your document to disk. The benefit is that you can keep right on working as Word does its housekeeping. You can tell when a background save is taking place because an animated disk appears on the status bar. When the disk disappears, the save is complete.

You can control whether the program utilizes background saving in the following manner:

1. Click the Office button and then click Word Options. Word displays the Word Options dialog box.
2. At the left of the dialog box click Advanced.
3. Scroll through the available options until you see the Save section. (Click here to see a related figure.)
4. If the Allow Background Saves check box is selected, Word will use the background saving feature.
5. Click on OK to dismiss the Options dialog box.