saving and loading global variables

I know that global variables are evil. But I'm taking over a project from someone else, and while I try to re-work it to avoid global variables, it would be helpful in the meantime if I could save or load the global workspace to a mat file. Does anyone here know a way?

This idea imports all global variables to the current workspace, and I guess I could save them from there, but I would have to remember that they were global when I re-imported the mat file http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/63455

This thread implies that a simple save used to work, way back in 1997 http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/newsreader/view_thread/82