>However large companies out there love security within their applications. Why? Because no-one without the proper authority can save changes to a document.

This is backwards, IMO. If you're not allowed to save changes, why are you allowed to make changes?

> One of the nice reasons for the save button is for it to work just like the OK button in the dialogs I was talking about: yes, it saves the changes and also closes the form. But what you don't realize is that in those windows dialogs, when you click the OK button, it is actually calling the same code the Apply button does, then when that's done, it closes the dialog.

I'm not sure how this applies to what I was saying, which is that a MessageBox telling the user the data has been saved is bad UI. I do know about the relationship between the Apply and the OK button. I just used both in a builder I wrote.

However, if you were replying to a different message, where I talked about Cooper's disdain for the "save" concept, I know what you mean, and I've addressed that myself. I think his ideas are more applicable to documents than to database records, but they're still worth thinking about.