Why Does Words Tell Me a Document Has Changed When It Hasn’t?
Hi everyone. Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com. If you're watching this someplace that has a
“Like” button at the end of this video hit that would you? It'll help other people find what
they're looking for as they search for their answers. And of course it'll also help me.
So let's look at this question. , “Hey Leo, what can I do when I close out of an existing saved
Word document to stop the ‘Do you want to save changes to your document window?’ from coming up
every time? Even when I haven't made changes or touched a thing.” Well Word definitely thinks
that your document has changed. And in fact it can't make an assumption about whether or not
you should or should not save the changes that it thinks have been made. And in fact, it can't
make a decision about whether or not it should or should not ignore what it thinks has changed.
So it's unclear that there is a way for it not to ask you. What may help though is understanding
why, and that can be, wel, l I’ll just say a little bit non-obvious. So one of the things that
is actually pretty interesting, when you think about Word, or other word processing programs
of similar caliber, is that your document is almost a computer program all to itself. It has
of course your words, your written instructions and so forth, but it also can contain things that
cause Word to quote unquote “do things.” And doing things can have a lot of different impacts in ways
that we don't necessarily consider. For example if you include in your document a code that says
“display here the time" this document was last saved”, okay,
every time you save the document the document has changed because that little field gets updated.
Now that's a chicken and egg situation that actually solves itself.
The more interesting ones are some of the other possibilities for things that can change
simply by looking at them. There are of course fields that can be used for
displaying things like date and time, even the current date and time. Which means that yeah
the mere act of opening the document causes that field to be updated and means the document has
changed even though you've not done a thing. The more common scenario is that you are looking at
the document on a system that has a printer other than the one that was in effect at the time the
document was saved. One of the reasons that we also sometimes wonder why a document will look
differently on two different machines is because Word is optimizing your document for the printer
it thinks you're about to print on. That could still be a Save as PDF printer. It could be
your real printer. The important thing is that it might be different than the other printer.
So at the time your document is saved all of the layout, all of the information, all of the
details are saved as they would be if printed on the printer that is currently in effect.
Now if you then change the default printer or take that document to a different machine that has no
printer or a different printer then the mere act of looking at the document may cause Word to say
“oh this is a different printer I need to re-lay out this document”. Even though all you did was
look at it the document from Word’s perspective is now different. The same is true if, for example,
pagination changes. It's very possible that your Table of Contents, if you have one,
could be completely different. But even if it's just the page numbers at the bottom of every page?
That can change depending on the characteristics of your system compared to whatever was in effect
when the document was last saved. I know it gets confusing and it gets annoying.
My solution is essentially ignore it all the time and just hit save anyway. There's no reason not
to. At least in the scenarios that I encounter. But hopefully understanding exactly why Word might
be asking you about changes that you didn't make will make it a little bit easier to decide whether
or not to hit save. Hopefully that was helpful. For links related to this article, for updates,
for comments and more visit askleo.com/2166. I’m Leo Notenboom. This is askleo.com. Take care.