Windows XP Home Edition: The Missing Manual

Saving Documents

In a few programs, such as the Calculator or Solitaire, you spend your time working (or playing) in the lone application window. When you close the window, no trace of your work remains.

Most programs, however, are designed to create documents—files that you can re-open for further editing, send to other people, back up on another disk, and so on.

That’s why these programs offer File→Save and File→Open commands, which let you preserve the work you’ve done, saving it onto the hard drive as a new file icon so that you can return to it later.

GEM IN THE ROUGH Why You See Document Names in Black

In the Save dialog box, Windows XP displays a list of both folders and documents (documents that match the kind you’re about to save, that is).

It’s easy to understand why folders appear here: so that you can double-click one if you want to save your document inside it. But why do documents appear here? After all, you can’t very well save a document into another document.

Documents are listed here so that you can perform one fairly obscure stunt: If you click a document’s name, Windows XP copies its name into the “File name” text box at the bottom of the window. That’s a useful shortcut if you want to replace an existing document with the new one you’re saving. By saving a new file with the same name as the existing one, you force Windows XP to overwrite it (after asking your permission, of course).

This trick also reduces the amount of typing needed to save a document to which you’ve ...