Black vs. Blue .doc Titles

[Jim Wood]

I thought I had this figured out once, but need a clarification from an
expert. My wife is running Office 2003 under XP/Home on a laptop, and the
same setup on her desktop. On her desktop computer (and mine, too, for that
matter!) most Word document titles are black. On the laptop some were black
and some were blue, but after I ran Windows Update a few days ago, now all
the .doc titles are blue. What gives here? Thanks.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

The blue filenames are compressed archive files.

 

[Jim Wood]

Thanks, Suzanne;

How did they get that way and what are the implications? Can these be
copied to another computer with, say, an earlier version of Word and opened
okay? Is the compression/archive utility something that can be toggled on
and off?

Jim

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I've already told you more than I know because I'm running Windows 2000, and
I believe this is a Windows XP feature. But I assume there is a setting in
Windows that causes files to be archived (compressed) after a certain
interval. You can probably find something about this in Control Panel or
perhaps Tools | Folder Options in an Explorer window. If you can't figure it
out from these guesses, try asking in a Windows newsgroup.

 

[Amedee Van Gasse]

Jim Wood shared this with us in microsoft.public.word.docmanagement:

Thanks, Suzanne;

How did they get that way and what are the implications? Can these
be copied to another computer with, say, an earlier version of Word
and opened okay? Is the compression/archive utility something that
can be toggled on and off?

It won't hurt, the compression has nothing to do with Word, it is a
feature of the NTFS filesystem and is completely transparant for all
aplications. Compression/decompression happens "on the fly". If you
copy the file to a medium that is uncompressable (like a FAT
filesystem) it is instantly decompressed.
Your computer is just trying to help you, trying to create a balance
between uncompressed files (a bit faster) and compressed files (a bit
smaller).

As a rule of thumb, files that you don't need very often (once or twice
per month or so) could be compressed, and files you need on a dayly
basis shouldn't be. To all rules there are exceptions. ;-)