- Getting Organized (and Staying That Way)
- Where Should You Keep Your Files?
- Creating New Files
- Naming Documents
- Using and Customizing Common Dialog Boxes
- Using Alternative File Formats
- Storing Extra Details About Your Documents
- Searching for Office Files
- Working with Multiple Files
- Setting Up Automatic Backup and Recovery Options
- Troubleshooting
- Extra Credit: Find Files Faster with Desktop Search Tools
Setting Up Automatic Backup and Recovery Options
No roller coaster can compete with the sinking feeling you get when an Office program hangs, crashes, or simply disappears. With most programs, you can kiss your unsaved work goodbye. But Office 2007, like its predecessors, comes with "air bags" designed to make crashes less frequent, to make them less devastating when they do occur, and to increase your chances of recovering a document when Office does crash.
If an Office program crashes while you're working on an open file, chances are good that you'll be presented with the Office Document Recovery task pane (see Figure 3.13) when you restart the program. Documents that are listed as [Original] probably aren't as up-to-date as those marked [Autosaved].
Figure 3.13 Office's Document Recovery task pane appears on the left side of the screen.
Every item that was automatically saved during Automatic Recovery gets its own entry in the Document Recovery task pane. In some cases, the recovery procedure actually repairs damage caused by file corruption. Click any entry to open it, examine its contents, and decide whether to save or discard it. If you're certain you know what to do with the item, click the arrow to the right of the item and choose whether to save it, view any repairs, or delete it. After you finish reviewing all recovered documents, close the Document Recovery task pane.
It is often worthwhile to save several recovered documents and compare the versions to see which (if any) have changes you want to save. To do so, click the down arrow to the right of the [Autosaved] filename and choose Save As.