[OT] Cool tiny tiny PC

[Tim Streater]

Then I've got two files, rather than having Word continue editing the one file under its new name.

[tony sayer]

In article , Tim Streater scribeth thus

Well is that a serious problem Tim?. You can use the "chooser" to rename the doc without even opening it but really I've never found that to be a problem at all!.

I sometimes re save the file if I'm making small changes to it a sort of mark 1 and 2, 3 etc but if you do make a spare unwanted file just delete it..

[Martin Brown]

That is usually a good way to protect users from themselves. At least then they don't end up with one file called "letter.doc" that contains only their most recently sent correspondence.

People can do really dumb things with computers.

Save As - Keeping previous revisions of documents is good practice.

[Tim Streater]

Very likely but I'm smarter than that. And it has nothing to do with the fact that, under XP and Win7 at least, I can neither move nor rename a file I have open in an MS Office program. Under OS X, using OS X versions of MS Office, I can do both with no problems.

Yes, we're all used to Save As so Apple fell on its face a bit when they tried to remove it. But they did add Versions, an API that an app can use to save previous versions of a file if that's what the user wants. I found that useful last night when wanting [1] to compare a PHP script with any version from late last year - although the important software under development here is in a versioning system anyway.

[1] Couldn't understand why a particular table in a database seemed to be empty, and looking at previous versions of the s/w convinced me to look in the mirror instead :-)

[Mike Barnes]

Yes it's good practice but unfortunately when you come down to it Save As doesn't suit that purpose very well. For most of us I guess what we really need is something that will make a copy of the original file as it was before we started editing it, and allow us to continue editing it. I could do that with a Word document for instance, as long as I hadn't saved any changes, using Windows Explorer. But not AFAICS from within Word itself.

However any manual revision control is rubbish when you're used to an automatic system that can take you back to any recent version whether you thought to save it or not. Coupled with a proper backup system for older versions, of course.

[Huge]

The sort of thing that RSX11/M had in the mid-70's, you mean? :o)

(Although I think that was more to do with FILES-11 than RSX specifically.)