Whenever I open a Word 7 document, I get a ghostly icon on my desktop
sometimes with a tilde dollar before the icon name. Once there was a time when
these little ghosts did not appear. I must have done something strange to cause
them, but I know not what. What can I do to eliminate them completely?
When you edit a Word document, Microsoft Word will create a temporary file
for your work in progress so as not to overwrite the document that youāre working on
until you actually click Save.
In this video segment from an Ask Leo! webinar, Iāll show that
icon, explain why itās probably visible, and what if anything to do.
]]>
Transcript
Whenever I open a Word 7 document, I get a ghostly icon on my desktop sometimes with a tilde dollar before the icon name. Once there was a time when these little ghosts did not appear. I must have done something strange to cause them, but I know not what. What can I do to eliminate them completely?
So, you didnāt do anything strange and in fact, thereās a very good chance that if youāve been reading Ask Leo! for awhile, you did something I told you to do.
So, let me show whatās going on here first. You can see here I have an example document on my desktop and is just that; an example document in Word and youāll notice there is no ghostly tilde dollar file. Iām going to close it and now Iām going to bring up Windows Explorer real quick. Weāre going to the Tools menu and Change a Folder option.
The Folder option that may have suggested you change is this thing about showing hidden files, folders, and drives. Click OK and youāll notice right away; Iām going to go ahead and close Windows Explorer and youāll notice right away that a couple of ghostly files actually showed up. Two copies of desktop.ne. I wonāt go into why there are two right now, but the fact is that they are files on the desktop.
They were just hidden so we have this Word document here on my desktop. Iām going to double-click it open again and son of a gun, there is a file called tildedollarampledocumentation. I grab the properties for it so that you can see that, in fact, they replaced the first character, the āSā with the tilde dollar sign so that it actually is tildedollarampledocument.doc.
So what that is: when Word works on a document, it creates a temporary file. Itās that temporary file that Word makes all of its changes in; saves things to disc on and so forth so that it doesnāt modify the original file until youāre actually done. Until you actually say Save. That is whatās happening here. Now, the other thing that had to come together for this to happen, you have to actually have the document on your desktop.
The document itself is in your desktop folder. I typically donāt run that way. I tend not to like a lot of things on my desktop. I know many people do, but this folder, this desktop folder is special in that every file that shows up in the desktop folder is actually something thatās meant to be displayed on your desktop, so when Word opens up and creates this temporary file in the same folder as the document⦠Well, thatās the desktop thatās going to get displayed. If as you saw, we had hidden Show hidden files and folders turned on.
Iām going to leave Word open so that this document, this temporary file sticks around. Iām going to go back to Windows Explorer and once again, by the way, Iām making this menu show up simply by hitting the Alt key. By default, it doesnāt show, but it does show easily by pressing Alt. Clicking Folder Options and going to go back to View and Iām going to go ahead and say Donāt show hidden files, folders or drives, which is the default setting for most Windows and youāll see that right away, weāre back.
The file is still there; itās just hidden. So it really now, what you want to do really depends on what you want to see or not see. There are several solutions for this problem. One is donāt place your documents on your desktop. Place them in a different folder so that when you open the document in that other folder, the temporary file gets created in that other folder.
The other approach is turn off Show hidden files. I tend to like showing files just because I want to see whatās on my machine. I want to really see everything thatās on my machine and then of course, the third solution (which is actually the solution that I tend to live with on my own desktop although I donāt put documents there) is live with.
Just understand what it is; itās a temporary file that Wordās created while youāre editing the document and donāt worry about it. Itās not hurting anything. Itās just showing up. That is what I would typically suggest you end up doing is just go ahead and ignore it.
What I wonder about is why some of those temporary files remain behind long after Iāve closed or even deleted their Word documents. Iād delete them, but Iām afraid of damaging any whose ārealā document still exists.
@Ward
That is not extremely uncommon. Itās generally safe to simply delete them If they are being used by MS Office, you would be blocked from deleting them.