When you open up MicroSoft Word in the upper left hand corner there is the MS Word icon and then the file name. Is there anyway to get the path to show up there?
A quick easy answer:
Folder Options/View/check “Display full path in title bar”.
Hope that helps.
David
Right click on the tool bar area or go to Tools>Customize. Under Categories, select Web. The first item on the list should be Address. Drag this to the tool bar area. Since it is a long item, I suggest dragging it to the top line where the menu items are located. When you open a document, this box will show not only the name of the file, but also the path. It comes in handy when you have both the job section and the master section of the same section open at the same time.
Thanks Alan and David!
I have gotten into trouble by working on the master spec file instead of the project spec file. Thus the need for this tool.
David: Never heard of that happening before! 
Try setting all of your master specification files to “read only” and you won’t have that problem again. The disadvantage is that when you really do want to edit the section you have to remember to change that attribute.
To avoid the problem described by David I often open the individual file as “read only”, which is a drop down box in the Word File Open dialog. It take a split second longer, but at least I avoid accidental damage. I do this when I’m borrowing specially written language from another project as well. One nice thing about this is that the file name has “(read only)” appended to the name, so it’s quick to identify in the title bar.
What I have done is to make my office masters into word template files and then opening them through explorer. It is not difficult to make master changes and it does make it hard to inadvertently open and modify an office master in the flurry of a working project.
Sounds like y’all have an office full of spec-writer wanna-bes, what with all this fear of unauthorized tampering and editing! How do I find me one of them thar eager beavers??
It’s not the others–it’s me, when I’m not paying attention! Suddenly I’ve deleted half the text from my master and saved it, thinking I’m working on the project spec. However, it is true that our office masters are in a read-only protected directory on the network level. But since I maintain them, I always have full access.
If the files are set to “read only” and you make any edits and try to save it, Word prompts you to save it under a different name. Hence, it doesn’t allow you to overwrite a “read only” file. However, I don’t have enough fingers to count the times I’ve messed up a “non read only” file. I can only thank our IT guy for his nightly incremental backups. Saved me countless times.