After you finish creating a document—actually, as soon as you create anything worth keeping— you should save it on a disk. Otherwise, it will be lost forever when you turn off the computer's power switch (or accidentally kick the computer's power cord out of the outlet). It doesn't matter whether you save the document on a 3.5-inch disk, a 5.25-inch disk, or a hard disk. Saving is the same regardless of the kind of disk you're saving on. What varies is the procedure for saving, and that can vary from application to application. Read the manual that came with your application for instructions on how to save documents created with that application. If the instructions are clear, you may not need to read this chapter.

With most applications, saving a document on a disk is a very easy, intuitive procedure. You select the Save command from a menu, and the application asks you a few straightforward questions about where you want to save the document and what you want to name it. Actually, the questions are only straightforward once you know what the application means by such terms as pathname, prefix, volume name, filename, format, directory, and subdirectory. This chapter explains these terms and other things you may need to know about saving documents on disk.

Before you can save documents on a blank disk, the disk has to be formatted. Formatting divides a disk into sections where information can be stored.

Different applications go to different lengths to help you get disks formatted:

Formatting is also called initializing.

• Some applications offer to format a disk automatically when they discover that you've asked them to save a document on a blank, unformatted disk.

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Chapter 4: Saving Documents