As an editor, I cannot stress the importance of saving and backing up your material.

Can you imagine losing several hours of work because you forgot to press Ctrl + S (or click the Save icon) before you closed your program for the day?

Actually, MS Office products are so smart that they won’t let you do that. If you start to close your work without having saved part of it, you will see a dialog box asking you if you want to save it.

However, you should save frequently, and not just when you are done for the day. There might be an unexpected power failure in your building—you know, those annoying ones that only last a fraction of a second but are just long enough to make your computer shut down or reboot. Or there may be a blackout that lasts for hours. In either case, you could lose a painful amount of work.

Or your computer or program could crash and have to be restarted. Same scenario.

I am an obsessive saver when I am using, for example, MS Word. I wrote this blog post (as I write all of my posts) originally on Word, and I pressed Ctrl + S (the Save keyboard shortcut) after every paragraph. Oftentimes, I save my work more often than that.

I used to save by clicking the Save icon (the picture of a floppy disk), but now that I am learning macros, I am trying to use keyboard shortcuts as often as possible. Besides, who uses floppy disks anymore? What is this, the 1990s? And speaking of outdated storage technology, I’ve noticed that flash drives are slowly going down the same path to obsolescence. Cloud storage is the way to go. (Someone once asked me where exactly the cloud is. I replied, “It’s in heaven.”)

One thing I have learned this week in my macros class is how to back up the macros that you have installed in Word. I won’t overwhelm you with the details here, but it’s actually quite easy to back them up—and very important. If Word or your computer crashes, you could lose all of them and then have to reinstall them one by one.

Are you an obsessive saver?