Word's Temp Files

I see a lot of comments asking, "why does Word create temp files?" or, "what are those hidden files with the little ~$ in front of them?" I'll answer both of those questions with a quick and dirty explanation of how Word works and why those temp file are important.

Document Files

First of all, we all know what document files are. Those are the "finished products" that we work on - .doc files. We pass these around, print them out, change them, etc. Well, from Word's point of view (as it is with many applications), these are only the finished products, not what you actively work on.

Owner Files

Owner files are those little files that start with ~$ and have the name of the document. They are hidden files (for Word's eyes only). They are not copies of the document and you don't lose anything if you delete them. In fact, with Word closed, you should not ever find any. If you do, that means that Word didn't shut down properly. You're okay to close all instances of Word, and search your hard drive (including hidden files) and delete any ~$ files you find.

If you'd like to know what they contain, you can try opening one. It's just binary code (as is the Word document format). But, you'll likely see a little bit of text like your name, and the company name listed in Word's properties dialog (File > Properties). There's other data too that includes a date and time, etc.

The big purpose for these files is for Word to know who owns a file ("owner" file... get it?). If Word finds one of these (always in the same place as the document file), then Word reads it to find out who's got it open and can then give you that handy dandy read only dialog that we all love.

Working Files

Working files is a bit more complicated. But then again, not. Working files are copies of you document files. They are the files that you're currently making changes to. When you "save" a document in Word, it commits these changes to these ~wrl...tmp files and your document file. Just watching Word do this in the background can be mind numbing and confusing. My advice: don't try: just ignore it and trust that Word will do the right thing.

The good thing about these files is that they can be used to recover lost documents. Say you're working, you just hit save and your power goes out. Power comes back on and you can't find your original document file - it's not where you left it! No problem! In the folder where you saved your document and you should find some ~wrl...tmp files (these are hidden). Just change the extensions from .tmp to .doc and try to open them in Word. You should at least get some of your work back. Save it as a new .doc file and keep on working!

Other Files

Now, there are other files like .asd files. They're autorecover files and we've covered them elsewhere. The big thing here is to understand that Word must use these files to work properly (for example, on a network) and the .doc is not the most important file to Word. Clearly, we care about .doc's, but Word needs more than that to do it's thing for you.

Clean up!

So, here's what you can do if you're really interested in cleaning out these files (a good practice).

1. Close Word and Outlook (if you use Word as your email editor)
2. Search your computer (including hidden files and folders) for files with the following name:
   ~*.tmp
3. Delete all files found (with confidence!)
   

For more "official" information see a great article written by a friend of mine on how Word creates and uses temp files.