There are several ways to save documents in Microsoft Word. You can save the active document you are working on, whether it is new or existed previously. You can save all open documents at the same time. And you can save a copy of the active document with a different name or in a different location.
If you have text or formatting you want to reuse in other documents you create, you can save a document as a Word template.
If you share documents with people who use previous versions of Word, and you want to be sure the documents look the same when they're opened in the earlier versions, you can turn off features that are not a part of that version.
Saving documents in other file formats
When you need to share documents with people who use other word processors or who use versions of Word that have a different file format (such as Word 6.0/95), you can save documents in other file formats. For example, you can open a document created in Word 6.0, make changes to it in Office Word 2003, and then save it in a format that Word 6.0 can reopen.
Saving documents for Internet, intranet, or Web use
If you use Word to create Web pages to display in a Web browser, you can save documents in Web page format and publish them to a Web server. You can also save documents to an FTP site on the Internet (you must have an Internet account through an Internet service provider and permission to save documents on the FTP server) or to your company's intranet.
Saving your documents as XML files makes them available to any programs that can read XML, not just Microsoft Office programs. This means that you can use a single source of your content in multiple ways simultaneously. For example, you can transform a single content source into both a Word document that is formatted for printing and into data that is processed.