This article explalins why Apple Menu Options does not always add a document alias in the "Recent Documents" menu for some documents.

This behavior occurs with various versions of the Apple Menu Options control panel including versions 1.1.2, 1.1.3, 1.1.4, 1.1.5 and 1.1.6 (included in System Software 7.5.3 through Mac OS 9).

The affected applications use a custom window definition (WDEF) to draw their document windows. Apple Menu Options makes "Recent Documents" aliases only for documents that are opened using the standard WDEFs.

If an application is using a custom WDEF, there is no way for Apple Menu Options to know whether the window is associated with a newly-opened file or with some other type of application window. This is a case of Apple Menu Options defaulting to a safe behavior. Apple Menu Options will sometimes fail to recognize real documents because of this behavior, but it prevents the user from getting "phantom" documents that do not really exist.

In Appleworks 6, you can always find recently-used documents in the Recent Items tab of Starting Points or by choosing "Open Recent" from the File menu.