Microsoft Word and temporary files

I was working on a Word document that I’d saved on my desktop. The document has a lot of few pages, and as I was writing, I kept going back to change things I’d written already. After I was finished with the entire document, I saved it and minimized the Word screen to find something else on my desktop, and behold! I saw over a 100 temporary files on my desktop, created by Word to save the changes and edits I’d made on my document.

That’s one of the most inefficient things I’ve ever seen in a software. Why can’t Word be more simple at keeping track of changes, like create a single, huge file with all the changes instead of having so many files for every open document, to record every kind of change? Yes, Word is one of the best ways to write a document, but when you’re working with dozens, or even more documents all the time, it becomes a memory and disk space clog.

Sure, once you close the file itself, those temporary files will be deleted. But what about when you’ve many documents open, and you leave your computer on for a few days while you work on those documents whenever you can. If the computer or even the program crashes, these temporary files won’t be deleted automatically. Imagine how many temporary files Word has left on computers over the years, simply because it crashed or couldn’t close a file properly. I just used CCleaner and it cleaned hundreds of such temporary files.

Evolve, Word, evolve!