double trouble

[Guest]

every time I use word or excell and save it to the desktop, when i open it
again I get a message about not being able to open the second one and do I
want to makle a copy ?

 

[D.Currie]

every time I use word or excell and save it to the desktop, when i open
it
again I get a message about not being able to open the second one and do I
want to makle a copy ?

First, saving it to the desktop is risky, but that's up to you.

Second, it's telling you exactly what the problem is -- you already have a
copy of the document open. It may be that you didn't properly close the
document to begin with, or it might be that you're double-clicking where you
should be single-clicking, and the computer is trying to open two instances
of the same document.

It could also be some weird permissions thing, but the message would be
slightly different, where it says that someone else has the document locked
or protected (can't remember it exactly) and/or it's a read-only document,
so your only choice is to open a copy of the document because the original
can't be edited.

 

[Pee Jay]

First, saving it to the desktop is risky, but that's up to you.
..... snip .....

How so?

As far as I can see it is no different to saving to any other folder
and I use it often as a temporary place to store some document I
download until I make up my mind as to keeping or deleting.

Works fine for me.

 

[D.Currie]

How so?

As far as I can see it is no different to saving to any other folder
and I use it often as a temporary place to store some document I
download until I make up my mind as to keeping or deleting.

Works fine for me.

If you're just using it as temporary storage, that's fine, but the desktop
is one of the things that system restore monitors. So, if you restore back,
you can lose documents. I've known people who've put storage folders on the
desktop, saved files, restored back, and not noticed that files were missing
until much later.

And since most people save things in "my documents" if you ever have someone
else working on your computer and they need to backup files for you, they
could easily *not* look at the desktop.

If you really know what you're doing and you don't let anyone else work on
the computer, you're probably fine. But most people aren't that much in
control.

 

[Pee Jay]

Thanks for the explanation. That would make sense for some people.

But, as I said, I only put things there temporarily and I include my
desktop folder in my daily backup routine so I cannot see it being a
problem in my case.

 

[D.Currie]

Thanks for the explanation. That would make sense for some people.

But, as I said, I only put things there temporarily and I include my
desktop folder in my daily backup routine so I cannot see it being a
problem in my case.

If you know what you're doing, you can so all sorts of things with your
computer that aren't recommended for "normal" users. I'm certainly guilty of
doing all sorts of things with my computers that I'd never tell my customers
to do. I figure that the advice I give here is for normal folks, and
everyone else will do as they please because they know the tricks and the
risks.

 

[novice1]

the message i get is that it's telling me there is already one of the
documents open with the same name ( and i can't find one open) when I open
the one on the desk top and that I can't open two of the same docs at the
same time even if in different folders and do I want to make a copy of one.
It does this for every doc I make in excell. For word it tells me that
C\....\desktop\jihn\doc is being used by john, do you want to make a copy ?

 

[george]

Also, I just did a search for every excelor word doc. i saved to the desktop
and all that was found for each, was the one on the desktop and it takes a
double click to open as it should. where are the other docs the computer
says are in use or elsewhere ?