This post is dedicated to a very common mistake that can cause a great deal of frustration when made. How many of my readers are familiar with this scenario, I know that I certainly am. You open up a document in a word processor. The document is very long and you decide that you want to make a shorter version to print out and save the long one for an electronic version. You delete a lot of text, some figures and a few charts. You think you are finished and so you go to save the document. Here is where horrible mistakes are made. You are distracted, you click “Save”, because that is what you do with documents, and go on about your day. When you go to get the long version out to print, it is gone and in its place is the much shorter version that you just created. You have just been a victim of an overwritten document. If you had clicked “Save As” you would have stored your shorter version under a new name and instead of losing your original you would have had two separate documents. This is why the distinction between “Save” and “Save as” is so important.
When you save something, you are replacing whatever currently exists at that file location with what you are currently working on. This is fine as long as you do not want to access the old version. When you use “Save as” you are creating a new file location distinct from the original one. This allows you to have more than one version of the same document.
When dealing with the scenario we discussed earlier, it is sometimes possible to retrieve overwritten documents. Some software, such as Microsoft Word, allows you to access previous versions for just this purpose. Also, you may use backups or various software to retrieve overwritten files.
I hope this is useful and thank you for reading!
Computer Literacy for Homeschool Students 