Microsoft disabling Word 2003's 'fast save' feature
Microsoft is killing off a feature in Office 2003 that the company said helped save time, but also ran the risk of exposing confidential information.
As part of Service Pack 3 of Office 2003, which will be available Tuesday as a free download from Microsoft's Web site, Microsoft is disabling Word 2003's "fast save" feature, which works by saving the changes made since the last save, rather than rewriting the whole document to disk.
"While the Fast Save feature speeds up the document-saving process by saving only the changes made to a document, the saved document may contain metadata, such as comments, erased text, previous versions, and authorship," Microsoft said in a white paper on the update. "Disabling Fast Save ensures that confidential data is protected against improper disclosure."
The change is part of what is expected to be the last major update to Office 2003. Service Pack 3 comes nine months after the broad release of Office 2007. It also includes a number of fixes and security enhancements and is designed to work better than prior Office 2003 versions with Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7. Microsoft still recommends large businesses test the software to make sure it plays nice with their collection of software.
During her years at CNET News, Ina Fried has changed beats several times, changed genders once, and covered both of the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These days, most of her attention is focused on Microsoft. E-mail Ina. 
of catching government and corporate wrong doing.
If MS cleans up all the security problems with their documents it's
going to be a lot harder keeping up with these bozos. ;)
But hey, the government is probably running Word 97. I know that NC State DOT is...
- The real threat: damaged documents!
- by Tsu Dho Nimh September 18, 2007 7:58 AM PDT
- Since "fast save" was first available, it has been known to mangle documents. It could mangle them so badly that they could not be opened again, and the rats nest of pointers and binary crap of the fast save technique made it unlikely you could dig your text out with any recovery tools.
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(3 Comments)The advice from professional writers has always been to turn fast save OFF and leave it OFF. Spending an extra 10 seconds per save is far better than spending hours reconstructing a document that was run through the Save-O-Matic word blender.