As i trawl through my dissertation i thought i’d share with you something nice i noticed:
Microsoft Word lets you click on the save shortcut icon (the now obsolete floppy disk) even when there’s nothing to save. When you save a document normally a progress bar can be observed to flash up briefly along the bottom of the window. However if you click save again, when there are no changes whatsoever to the document, nothing happens – no progress bar, no extra memory usage, nada. I can only assume this is a generous feature built in to reassure the customer. I myself click save about five times per minute, whether or not i’ve written anything.
Another nice consequence of this feature is that you can write a few sentences, save, open a new window and do something else, then return to the document an hour later, click save again and feel like you’re making progress.
