>As to the edit paradigm.....doing drill-downs so that you are only editing from the parent-child standpoint (the parent begin relative) works, but I find *it* can be cumbersome. Look at the Office paradigm: If you edit an Excel worksheet and add macros, graphs, and new worksheets to the workbook and then exit without saving changes, all changes are gone.

Wouldn't a better example of drill down edit processes with the Office pardigm be this...

I have a workbook with one worksheet full of data. I need to make a presentation of that data, so I add a separate worksheet/page in the workbook with a graph. The graph can not stand alone, it needs explained for my presentation, so I create a Word document. I embed the graph my Word doc, then the following month my clerk updates the source data in Excel. The graph changes when the workbook is saved, and I can reprint the Word Doc if necessary. Now say I edit the Word doc, change my verbage and explanations, and double click the displayed graph to change colors. When I go to close out of editing the graph, Excel will make me save before dumping me back into my originating Word doc. When I go to exit Word, it will likewise make me save... if I hit cancel on my save dialog from Word, my cosmetic changes to the graph are still intact.